I cannot help to swerve from the purpose of this blog today to speak of the man who first made me aware of the power of literature. This morning, news sources around America announced the passing of one of this nation’s greatest authors, Ray Bradbury, at 91 years old. When I was in seventh grade, a rather wise English teacher placed a copy of the dystopian Fahrenheit 451 in my hands. When most kids slogged their way through, I couldn’t help turning on the lamp next to my bed and reading his evocative prose for hours. Those nights I delighted in my struggle to fall asleep with all those allegories of a society that outlaws education and reading keeping me up past the midnight hour. Ray perhaps said it best with “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
If you ever wish to write, stand on a cliff, take a leap and build your wings on the way down. Ray was full of whimsical advice such as this one that I was privy to in my last semester at Columbia College Chicago in the spring of 2003. The annual Columbia Literature Fest had an event that hosted a live satellite chat at the Harold Washington Library. Ray, who was unable to travel out to Chicago from his stroke a year before that and because of his debilitating phobia of airplanes (ironic, considering some of his science fiction) sat for two hours, live on a big screen, answering audience questions to his heart’s content from Los Angeles. A rather transfixed young man I was with the brevity of his words and daily application of his talent to storytelling. There was no excuse to not commit one’s self to their labors of love, he taught me. Bradbury himself, in the months before that assembly, laid his body crippled from a mild stroke onto a hospital bed and over a matter of a week dictated a novel to his daughter off the top of his head.
Though Bradbury developed a reputation for being gruff and blunt with his booming voice, he was consistent in allowing those to approach his friendly demeanor, often being quite generous with lovers of literature and fellow writers, published and amateur alike. Bradbury’s biographer, Sam Weller, approached him years back with the idea of having an authorized documentation of his life. “I had written you a letter back in the 1980’s, Ray,” Weller said. Ray had him go down into his basement where the biographer found rows of wooden shelves fit for boxes, each marked with a year. “1983...April,” Ray mumbled to himself as his fingers searched through stacks of split open envelopes containing letters from fans. “Is this yours,” Ray said. Sure enough, Sam Weller held the same letter he has sent to Ray Bradbury as a child. “You kept my letter all these years?” Weller asked. “Of course…I save every letter a fan sends me!”
Bradbury’s career amounts to more than the published work of 27 books, 600 short stories, a screenplay for John Huston’s 1956 Moby Dick, numerous teleplays, and his own television hour, The Ray Bradbury Theater. Throughout this prolific career, Bradbury spoke of how death was so permanent. From twelve years old, where at a sideshow within a carnival that had rolled into his birthplace of a now much different Waukegan, Illinois, Ray was convinced that the written word assured immortality. On my shelf he remains and within that creative slice of my brain a future novel about innocence of childhood and love of baseball thanks to Dandelion Wine – you too, were as curious at eleven years old as Douglas Spaulding remains in that novel. Your frustration with censorship and burning itch to enlighten yourself is in Guy Montag of Fahrenheit 451. The cold mechanics of technology and our latent psychological fears have been probed within the Illustrated Man collection. The devastation we allow ourselves to live in growing generations develops a conscience when you read of a future where humans are bound to escape Earth for Mars in The Martian Chronicles. Ray Bradbury lives on in all of us, reminding those who remain aware that what we touch and create becomes immortal.
"Everyone must leave something in the room or left behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there" - Ray Bradbury
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