Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the essay “Just This Side of Byzantium” by Ray Bradbury (©1975 by Ray Bradbury), which is the introduction to a later edition of Bradbury’s 1957 novel Dandelion Wine. Passage B is adapted from Dandelion Wine (©1957 by Ray Bradbury).

Passage A by Ray Bradbury

I began to learn the nature of surprises, thankfully, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.

It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.

I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.

First I rummaged my mind for words mat could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night and time from my childhood, and shaped stories from these.

Then I took a long look at the green apple trees and the old house I was born in and the house next door where lived my grandparents, and all the lawns of the summers I grew up in, and I began to try words for all that.

I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer.

So from the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn’t stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his drenching sorrows.

Along the way I came upon and collided, through word-association, with old and true friendships. I bor- rowed my friend John Huff from my childhood in Arizona and shipped him East to Green Town so that I could say good-bye to him properly.

Along the way, I sat me down to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with the long dead and much loved.

Thus I fell into surprise. I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blundered into creativity as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true.

Passage B by Ray Bradbury

The facts about John Huff, aged twelve, are simple and soon stated. He could pathfind more trails than anyone since time began, could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine, could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream from where you last saw him. The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests. He ran laughing. He sat easy. He was not a bully. He was kind. He knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise and set. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.

And right now he and Douglas were hiking out beyond town on another warm and marble-round day, the sky blue blown-glass reaching high, the creeks bright with mirror waters fanning over white stones. It was a day as perfect as the flame of a candle.

Douglas walked through it thinking it would go on this way forever. The sound of a good friend whistling like an oriole, pegging the softball, as you horse-danced, key-jingled the dusty paths; things were at hand and would remain.

It was such a fine day and then suddenly a cloud crossed the sky, covered the sun, and did not move again.

John Huff had been speaking quietly for several minutes. Now Douglas stopped on the path and looked over at him.

“John, say that again.”

“You heard me the first time, Doug.”

“Did you say you were—going away?”

John took a yellow and green train ticket solemnly from his pocket and they both looked at it.

”Tonight!” said Douglas, “My gosh! Tonight we were going to play Red Light, Green Light and Statues! How come, all of a sudden? You been here in Green Town all my life. You just don’t pick up and leave!”

“It’s my father,” said John. “He’s got a job in Milwaukee. We weren’t sure until today ...”

They sat under an old oak tree on the side of the hill looking back at town. Out beyond, in sunlight, the town was painted with heat, the windows all gaping. Douglas wanted to run back in there where the town, by its very weight, its houses, their bulk, might enclose and prevent John’s ever getting up and running off.