![]() The proximate reason for the eerie solitude of the city at night is that everyone else has carefully secluded themselves in their living rooms in order to stare blankly and obediently at television screens. Bradbury’s Pedestrian is identifiable as the scion of a distinct tradition of urban rebellion or resistance, the dissident tradition of the nightwalker. “In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time” (569). Nor has he so much as glimpsed another pedestrian in the daytime, because people travel exclusively by car. “Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house.” Mead has never encountered another living creature on these nighttime walks. Once he has decided on a direction, Mead strides off along his desire path, then, at once purposeful and purposeless. He is half-consciously creating what Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, in their celebration of the edgelands that characterize the uncertain border between cities and the surrounding countryside, have classified as “desire paths.” These are “lines of footfall worn into the ground” that transform the ordered, centralized spaces of the city into secret pockets and that, in so doing, offer a “subtle resistance to the dead hand of the planner.” So he relishes selecting a route at random, thinking of it as a “path” rather than an avenue or road. ![]() 2053, or as good as alone,” it doesn’t matter which direction he takes. Mead, whose name gently reinforces the pastoral associations of those “grassy seams” that furrow the pavement, generally begins his nightwalks at an intersection, because from there he can “peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go.” But the point is that, “alone in this world of A.D. “To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o’clock of a misty evening in November,” the story begins, “to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. So, in this far from distant future, no one travels by foot. Indeed, the police state has in effect proscribed pedestrianism. ![]() ![]() In Bradbury’s dystopian parable-it is a satirical portrait of Los Angeles that, because of its bleak attack on urban alienation, continues to resonate-the supremacy of the automobile has made it impossible in practice to be a pedestrian. It is set in a totalitarian society at the midpoint of the 21st century, roughly a hundred years after it was written. “The Pedestrian” (1951) is a science-fiction short story by Ray Bradbury, only three or four pages long, about a man who, after nightfall, roams aimlessly and compulsively about the silent streets of a nameless metropolis.
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