Bradbury on Burroughs, and the Shepherdess on a Soapbox

"A number of people changed my life forever in various ways.
Lon Chaney put me up on the side of Notre Dame and swung me from a chandelier over the opera crowd in Paris.
Edgar Allan Poe mortared me into a brick vault with some Amontillado.
Kong chased me up one side and down the other of the Empire State Building.
But--Mr. Burroughs convinced me that I could talk with the animals, even if they didn't answer back, and that late nights when I was asleep my soul slipped from my body, slung itself out the window, and frolicked across town never touching the lawns, always hanging from trees where, even later in those nights, I taught myself alphabets and soon learned French and English and danced with the apes when the moon rose.
But then again, his greatest gift was teaching me to look at Mars and ask to be taken home.
I went home to Mars often when I was eleven and twelve and every year since, and the astronauts with me, as far as the Moon to start, but Mars by the end of the century for sure, Mars by 1999. We have commuted because of Mr. Burroughs. Because of him we have printed the Moon. Because of him and men like him, one day in the next five centuries, we will commute forever, we will go away...
And never come back.
And so live forever."
--Bradbury, in the intro to Porges' Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan


This was written in ‘75, back before talking with animals became an anthropomorphic faux pas, a time when even the greatest living sci-fi writer couldn’t imagine a future in which we didn't reach Mars by '99, or '00, or ‘01, or.... We live in a society where the night sky is a harbinger of fear, not wonder; we erase it with street lights whose wavelengths are--coincidentally?--those most hostile to human night vision. Primitive man had fire to ward away the demons, but he also had the stars to guide him home.

Why is this? When did our commutation change into an ostriching of heads under the ground? Even the moon seems dimmer. And though we talk endlessly about saving the jungle and its creatures, we do our damndest to isolate ourselves from anything that chitters or whispers or smacks its lips to say, I'm wild. What's worse: we do so under the guise of care, of human-ity. Really?

And yet, and yet...those wild things creep among us as we stumble around in night-blind bliss, and Mars still bides its time. We're not safer, just oblivious. To wit: I have a picture on my phone, showing what my street lamp conceals at night from apes afraid of trees. The heart of town, and here, a deer, invisible sans camera. I’ve no doubt she saw me well before I heard her rustlings and squinted uselessly into the bright yellow darkness with my dazzled eyes.

In daylight I find her hoof prints, dainty compared to the coyote tracks in my mud-filled gutter in the center of town.

Mars still waits.