Of Rockets and Dandelion Wine ~ RIP Ray Bradbury

I'm so sad to hear that Ray Bradbury, great American writer, has passed. Bradbury had a huge impact on all of us who grew up in the seventies. As a teenager you couldn't walk down the hall in school without seeing someone carrying around a dog-eared and beloved Ray Bradbury book - and I was one of them, a huge fan. The science-fiction may seem dated or naive to kids today, but the language and poetry of Ray Bradbury will live on forever, like that taste of dandelion wine lingering on your tongue or the feel of those Cream-Sponge Para-Litefoot tennis shoes.

He loved libraries and many of his plotlines are a litany of book titles and literary quotes.

"Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

That is obviously why he found the idea of censorship to the point of burning books to be the most dangerous idea, and he expresses that in his ironicaly but often-banned Fahrenheit 451. It is one of the classics of the 20th century, right up there with Catch-22 in capturing the hypocrisy and anti-intellectualism of modern life, and is still being taught in high schools around the world. We may forget how political it is. In the following quote the character could be talking about attitudes of this election year, the Tea Party versus the Liberals.

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar.  
... There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind.
...If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.

Bradbury was the master of the short story as well, thrilling readers with such masterpieces as "The Veldt" or "The April Witch," or "Fog Horn." Bradbury certainly had a way with titles from "The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit" to "A Medicine for Meloncholy," to "Boys Raise Giant Mushrooms in YOUR Cellar." He was like a cross between John-Boy Walton and Rod Serling, one minute wallowing in homespun nostalgia, the next dragging you into a Mexican cemetery to confront a row of death heads and the Grim Reaper.

The picture above is Bradbury's own painting of The Halloween Tree

He did what every great writer does - writing from his own experiences then expanding out to the universe, and that leap into the unknown was Bradbury's gift. He was that boy who ran like a gazelle through the wheat fields and ravines of rural Green Town, Illinois, under the shade of a million trees - the boy fascinated by lightning rods, carnival barkers, dusty books, and the history and mysteries of Halloween. But he is also the "Rocket Man" who channeled the Martian landscape to the point that we could taste that red dust. The boy heard the train whistle at night and wondered what his life would become. The adult writer imagined a lonely train stop where no one got off except himself, and then only for the strangest of reasons. RIP, Sir, in your October Country or out among the stars in your "Million Year Picnic."