A scene from 'Embroidery' from Ray Bradbury's collection of short stories from 'The Golden Apples of the Sun'. The three knitters await their impending atomic doom.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Embroidery
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Golden Apples of the Sun
A scene from 'Embroidery' from Ray Bradbury's collection of short stories from 'The Golden Apples of the Sun'. The three knitters await their impending atomic doom.
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3 comments:
Here's a wonderfully well written short story by Bradbury that no illustration will ever do justice. The last paragraph details the destruction of these three little old ladies knitting on their front porch on very scientific molecular level but it still comes across as some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read. To visually depict that would have been gross, but his words flow gracefully.
Some additional observations: The three little old ladies remind me of the "Spinners of Fate" or the "Wyrd Sisters" from 'The Exiles' in 'The Illustrated Man'. They represent the Old World ... a world of art, story, song, faith, belief, fear. etc. They, too, are destroyed by an uncaring modern technology. This idea came to my mind when I read the part about one of the ladies making a mistake on the human figure she was weaving into the fabric and subsequently "destroyed" the figure by taking out the weave. The ladies are likewise destroyed as their sub-atomic embroidery becomes unwoven in a flash of a nuclear bomb.
A brilliant commentary, very insightful. Yes, the three ladies clearly are the fates, a favorite topic of Bradbury's, along with the demise of mankind by some sort of technological, soul-less end... a surprising view for such a humanistic, non-religious fellow.
I really have nothing to add, other than that I am intrigued that the ladies have no defined features... making them both "anyone" and "inhuman" at the same time.
Thanks brother! Glad I'm close to the target. I think I'm starting to get a good feel for Bradbury.
As for the three ladies' lack of identity ... it has more to do with my inability to do faces well. I also wanted to emphasize the shadows cast by extreme light of a nuclear explosion through the porch railing. That didn't leave much room to focus on the characters. It turns out that I like them "undefined" too!
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