There have been many lovely and fascinating remembrances of Ray Bradbury following the writer's death, as well as a collective recovering of Ray's own understanding of his life and art.
One of my favorite tributes comes in The New Yorker from Junot Diaz (who I, in turn, love). It seems that the Bradbury story that haunted me also haunted him -- and hooked us at the same time of life, at that unsettling, powerful, vulnerable age of turning. The age of a spacious self, of cupping the hand around one's vocation for the very first, ecstatic time.
When I was young, Bradbury was my man. I followed him to Mars, to the veldt, to the future, to the past, to the heart of America, I rode out with him on the Pequod, and on rockets. He was the first of my literary obsessions, but he set the terms of what I talked about when I talked about loving an author. I read everything of his that was in the library, which wasn’t even a quarter of what he produced. Never saw the man in person, but when I was young I had dreams where he appeared, where we spoke. Of course, like a faithful nerd, I saw “Something Wicked This Way Comes” the Friday it opened; caught François Truffaut’s “Fahrenheit 451” on VCR; watched “The Illustrated Man” and “The Martian Chronicles” on TV; and was a faithful viewer of “The Ray Bradbury Theater,” but none of them ever came close to the magnificent light that poured off his prose. And then there was his story “All Summer in a Day,” a perennial middle-school favorite. I remember reading that story very young, when I was still wrestling with English, when I was only beginning to understand that I loved stories more than anything, that books would be my calling. I read that short tale, and when I came to those ruthless final lines I was shattered by them. In the back of the Madison Park library I read that story and cried my little eyes out. I had never been moved like that by any piece of art. I had never known what I’d been experiencing as an immigrant, never had language for it until I read that story. In a few short pages, Bradbury gave me back to myself.
[...]
He was and will continue to be one of the great gifts of my life.
Related:
- Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, SciFi, and Literature as Empathy
- Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- Poetry for the Science Fiction Fan
- 100 Favorite Science Fiction and Fantasy Titles
- Ray Bradbury Believes in Libraries
- Ray Bradbury Interviewed
Image Credit: Wired.com
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