“A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone wakened me, and that day I was born. And now? Now, let me see...She cast her mind back. Where was I? she thought. Ninety years...how to take up the thread and the pattern of that lost dream again? She put out a small hand. There...yes, that was it. She smiled. Deeper in the warm snow hill she turned her head upon her pillow. That was better. Now, yes, now she saw it shaping in her mind quietly, and with a serenity like a sea moving along an endless and self-refreshing shore. Now she let the old dream touch and lift her from the snow and drift her above the scarce-remembered bed.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine*
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Perhaps one of the most significant writers of the 20th Century died yesterday at the age of 91, but watching this video, one that I had found on the National Endowment of the Arts website a year or so ago, convinces me more than ever before that death must be an illusion, or merely another phase of life.
I haven't merely posted this video on my art blog as a tribute to a great man; I've included it here because, in it, Ray Bradbury - in a discussion regarding his "Farenheit 451", touches upon every conceivable facet of human creativity... with humor, warmth, wisdom, and a vitality that can only belong to one has envisioned - and come to terms with - his own immortality.
See you on Mars, Ray!
P.S. And a trip to Mars may happen sooner than any of us think... check this out!
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An essay by Bradbury published Monday, June 4, 2012 in the New Yorker can be found here.
* Dandelion Wine, a favorite of mine, and the novel that Bradbury noted as his "most deeply personal work" was expected to join the list of screenplays that have been adapted from his novels - "The Illustrated Man" and "Farenheit 451" leap to mind - via this article from the summer of last year.
"Drinking the Dandelion Wine of Ray Bradbury" by Alice Hoffman.
