“I would go
out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red lights of Mars,”
Bradbury wrote, “and say, ‘Take me home!’ I yearned to fly away and land there
in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.”
Has anyone ever written anything so redolent about the red planet, or about the longing of a bookish boy wanting to hop on a balloon or a spaceship and soar away?
“While I
remained earthbound, I would time-travel, listening to the grownups who on warm
nights gathered outside the lawns and porches to talk and reminisce … it was
the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty. It was the time of the fire
balloons … I’d helped my grandpa carry the box in which lay, like a gossamer
spirit, the paper tissue ghost of a fire balloon waiting to be breathed into,
filled, and set adrift toward the midnight sky … Once the fire got going, the
balloon whispered itself fat with the hot air rising inside …”
Surely you can
see that fire-balloon! Not any fire-balloon but that specific balloon that
the writer's grandpa had saved for him so that together they could set it “adrift
toward the midnight sky.”
If the image is
still vague, don’t give up. More stunning visual clarity is
coming.
“But I could
not let it go. It was so beautiful, with the light and shadows dancing inside.
Only when Grandpa gave me a look, and a nod of his head, did I at last let the
balloon drift free, up past the porch, illuminating the faces of my family. It
floated up above the apple trees, over the beginning-to-sleep town, and across
the night among the stars.”
Up, over,
across. The words trace the flight of the balloon as lyrically as any poet or
stylist ever could, carrying with it the enormous sadness of the boy who had just
let it go.
“We stood
watching it for at least ten minutes, until we could no longer see it. By then,
tears were streaming down my face, and Grandpa, not looking at me, would at last
clear his throat and shuffle his feet … Twenty five years later, I wrote ‘The Fire
Balloons,’ a story in which a number of priests fly off to Mars looking for
creatures of good will. It is my tribute to those summers when my grandfather
was alive.”
After
savoring the piece, I hurried off to see the Transit of Venus at a local
observatory.
This morning I learned that Ray Bradbury has passed away at age
91.
I read only
two of Bradbury’s work: “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles.” What
interested me even more than his work was his work ethic. Bradbury worked almost
every day of his life (fans of Stephen King can identify), pounding out a thousand words
a day on his typewriter. No computer or word processor for him. He was self-taught. The library was his refuge, his teacher. These days, people cite examples of tech icons
like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg to prove that you don’t have to go to school
to make your mark. We forget that before tech titans, there have
always been self-taught writers who made lasting contributions to literature
and civilization. Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature
without having ever seen the inside of a classroom while growing up.
“Everyone
must leave something 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.”
Bradbury’s own
words perfectly sums up what inspired and motivated him.
Go out tonight and look up. See that tangerine light overhead? That’s the planet Mars, with its “strange
dusts that blow over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.” It is the celestial body that
Bradbury made familiar to millions of us through literature.
