Hail and farewell...

Thank you Mr. Bradbury, for your contribution to the world's collective imagination. Your footprint, so distinct, is palpable and unmistakeable within my own musings. For me as it was for my father, star-gazing will never be the same again. Those ancient Martian cities, their silent dry canals, and your “balm of sun and idle august afternoons” are such striking inventions of fancy and fable, fantasy and nightmare, and are such I could never hope to build. You will always stir and move me.

So long, friend... 

-Klara

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 A few favorite excerpts.

(Illustration by Joseph Mugnaini)

The small boy, on the country road looked up and screamed. “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!” The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in illinois. “Make a wish, “ said his mother. “Make a wish.”

-Bradbury, Ray. “Kaleidoscope.” The Vintage 
Bradbury. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. pg 242

Yes, even Grandma, drawn to the cellar of winter for a June adventure, might stand alone and quietly, in secret conclave with her own soul and spirit, as did Grandfather and Father and Uncle Burt, or some of the boarders, communing with a last touch of a calendar long departed, with the picnics and the warm rains and the smell of fields of wheat and new popcorn and bending hay. Even Grandma, repeating and repeating the fine and golden words, even as they were said now in this moment when the flowers were dropped into the press, as they would be repeated every winter for all the white winters in time, Saying them over and over on the lips, like a smile, like a sudden patch of sunlight in the dark. Dandelion wine. Dandelion wine. Dandelion wine.

-Bradbury, Ray. “Dandelion Wine.” The Vintage Bradbury. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. pg 207

(Illustration by Joseph Mugnaini)

“A carnival should be all growls, roars like timberlands stacked, bundled, rolled and crashed, great explosions of lion dust, men ablaze with working anger, pop bottles jangling, horse buckles shivering, engines and elephants in full stampede through rains of sweat while zebras neighed and trembled like cage trapped in cage.

But this was like old movies, the silent theater haunted with black-and-white ghosts, silvery mouths opening to let moonlight smoke out, gestures made in silence so hushed you could hear the wind fizz the hair on your cheeks.”

-Bradbury, Ray. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.

(Illustration by Joseph Mugnaini)

“Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think--the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?” The Martian was silent, but then he looked on ahead. “But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.”

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2002: Night Meeting”. The Martian Chronicles. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1950. pg 85

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Ray Bradbury's Night Meeting, by Daniel Torres.

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