The news of Ray Bradbury’s death (the Guardian’s obituary is here) has brought back so many memories — and regrets that a pile of paperbacks from four decades or so ago (yes, I’m a hoarder) are currently stored three thousand miles away. Maybe one thing worth mentioning is the way that Bradbury struck me back then as such a gloriously American writer. How exotic and inviting that seemed. Mars. Venus. America. Well, I got to one of those places anyway.
As the Guardian notes, the New Yorker has just run a lovely, and, it seems, recent, autobiographical piece by Bradbury. Needless to say it’s well worth reading. And there is this by his grandson, Danny Karapetian:
If you’re looking for any single passage to remember him by, I just picked up my copy of The Illustrated Man, my favorite of his books. The introduction is entitled “Dancing, So As Not to Be Dead,” and there are some great lines about death. My favorite:
“My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M.
So as not to be dead.”