Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 21, 2020

Penultimate Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. Ray Bradbury, born August 22 (tomorrow!), 1920, died June 5, 2012, 91 years old (or young, as he probably would have said). He had suffered a stroke in 1999, recovered some mobility, but he usually dictated his writing to one of his daughters for the next decade. On May 28, 2012, a week before he died, he wrote a short essay for the New Yorker’s “Sci Fi” issue which was published in the double issue of June 4 - June 11. The New Yorker, applying its usual misunderstanding and condescension of science fiction/fantasy writers, illustrated the essay with a painting of a skull on fire, a dark demonic image. Bradbury’s essay was about his love for his grandfather and a fire balloon they launched from the lawn in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1924. It is a remarkably gentle, deeply affectionate revelation of awe, transition, loss, and beauty. The grandfather died the next year. In a few spare words, his farewell as best as he could make it, Bradbury for one last time lit a pathway from a sense of wonder to an intimation of immortality. He explained one marker of this experience was his short story “The Fire Balloons,“ which was later incorporated first into The Illustrated Man and later into The Martian Chronicles. Thus once again, as he had consistently accomplished throughout his writing life, Bradbury brought his art around again to unity, to wholeness, to reconciliation. The essay was wasted on The New Yorker, but it was a graceful wave to a lifetime of hard work, his joy in that work, and to millions of readers around the world.