SOMETHING POIGNANT THIS WAY COMES
Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012). How sad and how strange to type those words and those dates, yet Ray lived a full, long life, and he gave a part of it to us all. I remember in the great days of science fiction, in my early teens, opening my various paperbacks of his work whilst lying in my bunk in the darkened cabins of long-gone ships. He took me into a strange and wondrous world, and the words he used to set up his fantastic scenarios, always with that mixed atmosphere of creeping dread offset by nostalgia for childhood’s golden days. They were the key which fired and unlocked my imagination. It was Ray who showed me the possibilities of the unexpected, his agile mind describing shadows beyond the light from the sun and moon where something strange would always lurk. I was that boy in Something Wicked This Way Comes; he made us feel the fairground, smell the hot dogs, clutch the texture of the sawdust. And when he went into outer space in The Martian Chronicles, it was not technology which fired our emotions; it was the humanity of his characters. No-one could surpass his skill as a short story writer; The Golden Apples of The Sun is the finest collection of perfect yarns you could wish for. His screenplay for John Huston’s version of Moby Dick is a concise lesson in how to retain and condense all the drama and mystery of Melville without doctoring the original dialogue. And then there’s Fahrenheit 451; ample evidence that Ray distrusted the future; the dystopia that book represents is all around us now.
There are plenty of his obituaries around on this sad day. Yet I recall the story I heard about Ray as a child, wandering in the woods near his home. On one occasion, he had written something on a scrap of paper and placed it in a knot-hole in a tree. Many decades later, his literary fame achieved, he went back to those woods and as he wandered between the old, watching trees, he found the ancient oak where he’d deposited his childhood message. The knot-hole had grown over, but he dug at it with his pocket knife and sure enough, there was the rolled-up sheet of antique notepaper. He extracted it from the tree, wondering what he had written in the first decade of his eventful life. He unrolled the fragile, yellow page, to find the message, written in pencil: I remember you.
The season of funerals rolls on, Ray. But like all writers and readers with a lust for the fantastic, the inspirational, who seek to peek behind the curtain of existence,
I remember you, Ray, and thank you for everything.
