Henry Bemis on an eight-hour tour of a graveyard.“Īs he contemplates suicide, Henry notices that the public library is still partially standing in the distance. They lie at his feet as battered monuments to what was, but is no more. A neighborhood bar, a movie, a baseball diamond, a hardware store, the mailbox of what was once his house and is now a rubble. Henry Bemis, who looks for a spark in the ashes of a dead world. When Henry awakens, he climbs out of the rubble to discover that the world has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. A headline reads: “H-Bomb Capable of Total Destruction” -and suddenly a massive explosion shakes the entire building, knocking Henry unconscious and spilling open his book (he was reading A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving). The next day, Henry goes back down to the vault to read the newspaper. ![]() This contradiction is made potently apparent in the hopeless struggle of Henry Bemis. If leisure is the fertile soil in which high culture must flourish, it has struggled to find a home in the modern labor market. I remember bringing a copy of Great Expectations to read at one of my first jobs working a cash register. The tension between employment and reading literature is a struggle faced by every modern intellectual. She marks up a book of poetry so Henry cannot read a single word. Later he comes home to his shrew of a wife who prohibits him from ever reading –even newspapers are forbidden. He wears large, thick spectacles and is employed at a bank which forbids him to read David Copperfield even while isolated in the vault during his lunch break. Henry Bemis is a clumsy Geek, obsessed with reading books, but tragically he is prevented from pursuing his one hobby. He’ll have a world all to himself… without anyone.“ Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. ![]() Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. In the episode we enter into the life of Henry Bemis (played by the great Hollywood actor, Burgess Meredith whose popularity skyrocketed following this episode, leading to several more appearances in future episodes of The Twilight Zone). “Time Enough At Last” is a parody of the modern drive toward productivity, anti-intellectualism, and the struggle to find quietude and space to simply read books. Bradbury later submitted several scripts for The Twilight Zone however the only episode he is credited with creating is “I Sing the Body Electric” in Season 3. The story was initially released and published in If Magazine in 1953, the same year that Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451. “Time Enough At Last” is based on a short story of the same name by American writer Lynn Venable (it is this story for which she is most fondly remembered). It is the first episode not to be a wholly unique creation from the mind Rod Serling. ![]() “Time Enough At Last” is an absolute classic of The Twilight Zone. There was-was all the time I needed…! It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”
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