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Ray Bradbury: A Writer Who Saw Happiness as Possible

I especially loved the way the show began, with footsteps and a shadowy face visible through the milky glass window of an office door.

The face came into full view once the door was opened, and it was Ray Bradbury who walked inside.

His office resembled a toy store rather than a workplace. “People ask, where do you get your ideas?” he would say. Then the camera would pan the festive, enticing clutter of his office, featuring plastic figures, news clippings, maps, and a globe.

Here, Bradbury would suggest that all he had to do was look around to see stories forming in the the clutter.

“I will never starve here,” he would say before sitting down at his typewriter to write. The focus would zoom in toward the fresh sheet of typing paper before beginning the show, The Ray Bradbury Theater – an eighties HBO production.

Every time I saw this, I wanted to gather up a bunch of favorite toys from my childhood and watch the stories magically form. Although actual writing was never quite so simple as that, just thinking about the Bradbury office inspired me.

I later learned that many famous writers were suicidal alcoholics who hated writing and would not know what to do with a plastic dinosaur if they had one.

For me, the lives of unhappy writers, such as Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway, offered a bleak picture of artistic success. It seemed as if attaining it meant a quick descent into suicidal misery.

When Ray Bradbury died last summer, I remembered that he was a writer who loved what he did, and that he seemed to defy the rule – a talented writer who enjoyed writing, who was not obsessed with death, but fascinated with life.

“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” he said. “Live as if you\’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It\’s more fantastic than any dream.”

Although this may be true, the dreams of Ray Bradbury are fantastic enough. In “The Foghorn,” he explores the mysteries of the sea. The story is about a dinosaur who has lived for millions of years in the unseen depths of the ocean. He hears a foghorn and falls in love with a lighthouse, thinking its lonely sound is the cry of another dinosaur.

The fog Horn blew.
And the monster answered.
A cry came across millions of years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone…

When the dinosaur discovers his soul mate is just a lighthouse, he destroys it and retreats back into the lonely sea.

While this is not a happy story, it reflects the sense of wonder Bradbury talked about, a curiosity about the hidden depths of things and what lies within.

With so many jaded, cynical writers populating the annals of literature, how did Ray Bradbury manage to remain unscathed?

A hint of an answer may lie in a childhood story. In Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury told about how some boys bullied him into destroying his favorite comic books. He felt sick with regret afterward – then angry and defiant. He held on tightly to the comic books he had left, vowing to never again destroy anything he loved.

The defiant refusal to part with what he loves comes through in his fiction. In many of his stories, society robs simple joys. In Fahrenheit 451, people who take walks for the fun of it are viewed with suspicion. Reading books is forbidden. Wall sized televisions enclose home owners on every wall.

His dystopias are like waves that roll onto shore and pull away the small things that make life worthwhile. By taking them away in his fiction, Bradbury proves their worth.

In another story, “The Murderer,” no one ever enjoys a moment of silence. The futuristic society is full of incessant electronic chatter. Appliances talk. The citizens wear wrist radios. Communication devices blare music once the talking stops.

One character has an inspiration: he destroys every chattering electronic device he can find, including his wrist radio – and finds happiness, even when he is committed to a psychiatric hospital for his deviant behavior.

It is as if Bradbury is protecting the comic books all over again in his stories, simple things that people view as worthless and are all too willing to part with. To recover these “meaningless” joys, his characters mount fierce resistance.

Bradbury\’s dedication to what he loved may have been what protected him from souring on life, as many writers have. “Fall in love and stay in love,” he said. “Write only what you love, and love what you write.”

Money and fame never destroyed him, maybe because he never forgot that the point of writing is writing.

Many people are fascinated with writers who are mentally ill or suicidal, whose lives are in shambles. To me, Bradbury is more interesting. He defied the stereotype. He was a perceptive writer who could see the world as it is without becoming cynical.

His fiction reflects the mood of someone who is seeing the world for the first time. His rich imagery and the rhythms of his sentences create the authentic voice of someone who can look at everyday things and see what is amazing about them.

This ability stayed with him into his nineties and he continued to write. Although he did not have an artificially optimistic view of humankind or technology, he saw hope.

I admire the stubbornness that may have saved him, his childish unwillingness to see the world as others saw it or to define what is important by the values of the age.

He found richness in imagination and reading, and surrounded himself with things he loved. In doing so, he became one of the few famous writers who managed to fully embrace life, both on the page and beyond it.

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