Ray Bradbury on Reading and Television from Word for the Wise from Merriam Webster

August 22nd marks 87 years since the birth of Ray Bradbury. That prolific and beloved writer has been at work for more than six decades, producing works ranging from fantasy to literary essays to horror to mystery.

Bradbury is commonly considered a science fiction writer, someone who creates works dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals. Ray Bradbury objects to that, asserting "I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it." That observer of life also had this to say about humanity: "We are an impossibility in an impossible universe."

Not surprisingly for the man who wrote Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel about a society in which books were banned and burned, Bradbury appreciates power of libraries too, asking

"Without libraries, what have we? We have no past and no future." He goes on to note, "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

And how does one get people to stop reading? Bradbury turns his eye toward the tube, bemoaning "The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little."