Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 14, 2020
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Daily Ray Bradbury Centenninal post. With the centennial day (August 22nd) a week away, it is time to address the cat in the room. Ray Bradbury loved cats. Cats figure in his fiction from the beginning to the end, the latter suggested in his collection, The Cat's Pajamas (2004). Bradbury had suffered a stroke in 1999. He recovered to be able to use a wheelchair and a walker, and he continued to visit sf/fantasy convention until 2009, but his writing became dictation to one daughter and arranging for collections of his rich trail of short stories. His favorite and longest-lasting author photo for his books was of him and his black cat in front of a bookcase. The dark calico in the final photos survived him. In his fiction cats were the closest he came to describing an alien intelligence, one independent of human standards and arbitrary in a human perspective only because so little understood. It is telling that cats often come out better in his stories than children do. Children often are without moral engagment and therefore possibly dangerous, as in "The Veldt" most famously. Cats, on the other hand, may take an interest, but they lack the personal taste for vengeance. Bradbury's most-often repeated quote on creativity used cats as an analogy, one understood by those of us who understand cats as equal companions rather than as pets: “That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”
