A Psychological Shipwreck, Pan with Us, and Sootfall and Fallout
The Ray Bradbury Challenge - February 22, 2025
I was taken down quite abruptly by the flu on Tuesday. As I emerge from the blur of the last four and a half days, I sincerely doubt that the flu and I had ever met before. The common cold, of course, but the dreaded influenza? I don’t recall being this miserably sick even with Covid. I’ll spare you the dregs, in summary it was akin to being in a hallucinatory haze where your body is in pain and your mind won’t shut up. On the upside, broth never tasted so good.
As I am coming back to life, I wanted to let you know that I’m learning more than I ever imagined from these random readings. I have also fallen in love with the essays of E.B. White. Yes, that E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web.
Here’s what I read today for The Ray Bradbury Challenge. I’ve included the full poem, and a short excerpt from the short story and the essay.
Short Story: A PSYCHOLOGICAL SHIPWRECK, by Ambrose Bierce.
…It seemed to me as if she were looking at me, not with, but through, those eyes-from an immeasurable distance behind them - and that a number of persons, men, women and children, upon whose faces I caught strangely familiar evanescent expressions, clustered about her, struggling with gentle eagerness to look at me through the same orbs. Ship, ocean, sky - all had vanished…
Printed in the anthology: 75 Short Masterpieces. Read full short story here
Poem: PAN WITH US, by Robert Frost
Pan came out of the woods one day, - His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray, The gray of the moss of walls were they, - And stood in the sun and looked in his fill At wooded valley and wooded hill. He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand, On a height of naked pasture land; In all the country he did command He saw no smoke and he saw no roof. That was well! and he stamped his hoof. His heart knew peace, for none came here To this lean feeding save once a year Someone to salt the half-wild steer, Or homespun children with clicking pails Who see so little they tell no tales. He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach A new-world song, far out of reach, For a sylvan sign that the blue jay's screech And the whimper of hawks beside the sun Were music enough for him, for one. Times were changed from what they were: Such pipes kept less power to stir The fruited bough of the juniper And the fragile bluet clustered there Than the merest aimless breath of air. They were pipes of pagan mirth, And the world had found new terms of worth. He laid him down on the sun-burned earth And ravelled a flower and looked away - Play? Play? - What should he play?
Essay: SOOTFALL AND FALLOUT, by E.B. White,
Turtle Bay, October 18, 1956.
“…I think man’s gradual, creeping contamination of the planet, his sending up of dust into the air, his strontium additive in our bones, his discharge of industrial poisons into rivers that once flowed clear, his mixing of chemicals with fog on the east wind add up to a fantasy of such grotesque proportions as to make everything said on the subject seem pale and anemic by contrast. I hold one share in the corporate earth and am uneasy about the management. Dr. Libby said there is new evidence that the amount of strontium reaching the body from topsoil impregnated by fallout is “considerably less than the 70 percent of the topsoil concentration originally estimated.” Perhaps we should all feel elated at this, but I don’t. The correct amount of strontium with which to impregnate the topsoil is no strontium. To rely on “tolerances” when you get into the matter of strontium 90, with three sovereign bomb testers already testing, independently of one another, and about fifty potential bomb testers ready to enter the stratosphere with their contraptions, is to talk with unwarranted complacency. I belong to a small, unconventional school that believes that no rat poison is correct amount to spread in the kitchen where children and puppies can get at it. I believe that no chemical waste is the correct amount to discharge into the fresh rivers of the world, and I believe that if there is a way to trap the fumes from factory chimneys, it should be against the law to set these deadly fumes adrift where they can mingle with fog and, given the right conditions, suddenly turn an area into another Donora, Pa….”
I didn’t find an online link to the full essay, but you can read it in his book Essays of E.B. White in the section called The Planet. If any fellow Substackers know of an online reference, please add to the comments section. It’s well worth the full read. Strontium 90 is one of the radioactive waste fallouts from nuclear testing. Strontium is similar to calcium, attaches to our bones and causes bone cancer.
What did you read today?
The Ray Bradbury Challenge is based on advice to writers at a lecture in 2001 - Every night read one short story, one poem and one essay. Then once a week, write a short story.