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The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm
The post I was going to make this morning will have to wait, because I turned on my computer and found that Ray Bradbury had died.
The summer before I started high school, I had to read three books for Social Studies and English: Brave New World (1932), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). I had read Bradbury before; there were short stories of his everywhere in my parents' collections and I loved The Halloween Tree (1972) (illustrated in one of its editions by Leo and Diane Dillon, speaking of others who are gone). "Fever" was included in some seventh-grade workbook I'd read around in and in eighth grade we'd been assigned "All Summer in a Day." It wasn't like reading Tanith Lee's Secret Books of Paradys, where I could feel the inside of my head rearranging itself with each fevery line. But after that summer, I began going methodically through my parents' shelves, taking down The Martian Chronicles (1950), Dandelion Wine (1953), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), and as many anthologies as had his name in the table of contents, because I had found someone who wrote the way I liked. There were novels, but there were many more short stories. His prose was poetry in paragraphs, sometimes more whispering and evocative, dry autumn leaves of a season that never stayed away, sometimes as blue-sharp and sudden as the lightning that was another of his favorite images. The authors I would buy on sight in used book stores all through high school were Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison, all teaching me different ways to damn Strunk and White and put words together. From him, I really think, I learned that you could write about space as if it were as mythical as the Titans and as immediate as your fingernails. We had different views on autumn, but I gladly kept reading his.
The last time I looked him up, he was still alive. I had just discovered him grousing about prunes at Stan Freberg; I was glad to see he was still around. I said to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ap_aelfwine, "Bradbury makes everything better."
He made it darker, more wondrous, full of the ghosts of an America I never lived in and futures that even in his lifetime would never turn out as he wrote them, as alien and instantly known as the copper-waning face of Mars. Everything his words touched became one myth or another—progress, past. You could look up into the night sky and see his stories.
Late that night, I dreamed the fire balloon came back and drifted by my window.
—Ray Bradbury, "Take Me Home"
The summer before I started high school, I had to read three books for Social Studies and English: Brave New World (1932), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). I had read Bradbury before; there were short stories of his everywhere in my parents' collections and I loved The Halloween Tree (1972) (illustrated in one of its editions by Leo and Diane Dillon, speaking of others who are gone). "Fever" was included in some seventh-grade workbook I'd read around in and in eighth grade we'd been assigned "All Summer in a Day." It wasn't like reading Tanith Lee's Secret Books of Paradys, where I could feel the inside of my head rearranging itself with each fevery line. But after that summer, I began going methodically through my parents' shelves, taking down The Martian Chronicles (1950), Dandelion Wine (1953), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), and as many anthologies as had his name in the table of contents, because I had found someone who wrote the way I liked. There were novels, but there were many more short stories. His prose was poetry in paragraphs, sometimes more whispering and evocative, dry autumn leaves of a season that never stayed away, sometimes as blue-sharp and sudden as the lightning that was another of his favorite images. The authors I would buy on sight in used book stores all through high school were Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison, all teaching me different ways to damn Strunk and White and put words together. From him, I really think, I learned that you could write about space as if it were as mythical as the Titans and as immediate as your fingernails. We had different views on autumn, but I gladly kept reading his.
The last time I looked him up, he was still alive. I had just discovered him grousing about prunes at Stan Freberg; I was glad to see he was still around. I said to
ap_aelfwine, "Bradbury makes everything better."He made it darker, more wondrous, full of the ghosts of an America I never lived in and futures that even in his lifetime would never turn out as he wrote them, as alien and instantly known as the copper-waning face of Mars. Everything his words touched became one myth or another—progress, past. You could look up into the night sky and see his stories.
Late that night, I dreamed the fire balloon came back and drifted by my window.
—Ray Bradbury, "Take Me Home"
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You can still mourn for the stories. I'm going to be a mess when Ellison dies. It doesn't matter that he was often and enthusiastically (as
"I became a great Tarzan fan," says Ray, "and began cutting out the Burroughs comic strips and pasting them in a huge scrapbook. I had already started collecting Buck Rogers comics in 1929. I also saved Flash Gordon, and Prince Valiant was another favorite. I still have all these beautifully drawn comic adventures down in the cellar carefully packed away in an old trunk. When I want to recapture that era I just tip back the lid. A writer's past is the most important thing he has, so I've been a packrat. I've kept everything I've ever cared about."
Not all of us are able to do that. He was still one of the pieces of my past I'd keep.