Deism And Ray Bradbury

Deism Within: There Will Come Soft Rains In Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, the graphic images of futile ceremonies, the wrath of time, and images of the long gone creators all display the ideals of the deism in a post-nuclear town house. The deists’ perspective being that creation, like a watch, had a creator, however for whatever reasons that creator has left its watch running. The theory being that if one threw the pieces of a watch into the ocean that without a maker those pieces could not put themselves together. In this story, a family is the watch makers, and their watch has continued to tick along, without noticing they have left. The house takes on the part of a culture, the family its gods, and time becomes its destroyer. Stimulating the progression and decay of all created things created, be it a house or a society. Time and nature are the enders of all things, and will eventually break down the all of creation. The house continues to practice in vain ceremonies to please its masters long after their leave. Practicing the ceremonies flawlessly, “the… stove … ejected … perfectly browned toast, eight eggs, sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon…, and two cool glasses of milk,”(719) as a means of bringing back the masters. Recreating even simple rituals “… In the study… a cigar popped out, half an inch of ash on it, smoking, waiting” (721) shows the wishful nature that the automated construct takes on in its fruitless ventures. Just the fact that the machine waits shows a wishful nature, demonstrates that perhaps slowly the house has taken a nature, liking it to a simply beast. Just as the last living resident in the story, the dog, is waiting for the return of its master, but in the same way the dog dies of despair, so the house is dieing. The creation is looking much in the same way children search and wait for their parents when lost.

Even in the rubble of the future, only the silhouettes and the names of the creators are left behind. As a cruel relic of the inhabitants for the automated domicile are the charred outlines, “The entire west fence of the house was black, save for five places” (719), of the family upon one of the few remaining walls. The father mowing, the children playing, and “Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers” (719) alike to symbols often employed within spiritual groups. As a naive child, the cold voice of the house calls out the name of its obliterated goddess, “Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?” (721) displaying the computers hope without hope to call the dead back to life. However, no matter how much it calls out, the masters of the house have been devastated and will never return, nothing human survived the blast, only their shadows remain. The teachings, programming, and rituals, daily habits, are all that remain. Without understanding the meaning of its ceremonies it continues to tick though its daily tasks with no reward to itself. The story shows how time eventually destroys all works of man, showing how all things break down with out higher aid. Without the masters to maintain the machines they fall apart “A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window” (721) the automatons' way of life and rituals have no programming for change and thus cannot adapt in time to save their civilization as they know it. Watches need to be wound and tuned, but without its masters it winds down, slowing its beating heart of gears and cogs to a near stop as it desperately searches for the humans it formerly served to rescue it. As well as falling to time, the house is unnatural; robotic, soulless, and cold so that nature fights to reclaim the house. The fire is exactly that, the very soul of nature taking the form of destruction to root out that which is bizarre to it. The motorized nation falls

from the fragility of the upper levels all the way to the lower levels, “The crash. The attic smashing into the kitchen and parlor. The parlor into the cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.” (722) , demonstrating the natural decay of all life as it falls. Life and death have a natural order in which they occur; life is created from the bottom up, while death decays the top and works its way down. In conclusion, the watch had a maker, even if that maker left it to run itself and the maker is obliviously taken off. Only the names and shadows of the masters remain, causing the machine citizenry to carry on futile rituals in honor of fore gone masters. With the lost of the masters, the vastly advanced system falls without maintenance, from the tip of the attic to the foundation of the basement, displaying the top-down regression of any structure. As a closing thought, Percy Shelley once wrote of a statue in the sand that read “"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"”, just as the invincible empire of Ozymandias fell, so do all works of man and man-kind with time, it is natural. Nothing stands forever, but upon the rubble is built future societies, perpetuating life onward and upward. The watch maker may have left his creation behind, but it will still tick with zeal up to the last moment it can.

Bradbury, Raymond. “There Will Come Soft Rains”. The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Garyn G Roberts. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2003. 719-22.