In light of our new century’s ‘patriotic acts’ affecting American freedoms, the ‘lawful’ confiscation of citizens’ library records, the traditional banning of books whenever and wherever in America some men still fear “the word “ (the barbaric burning of `dangerous books’), it might be appropriate to suggest reading/re-reading the prophetic American writer, Ray Bradbury again. In particular, his classic, FAHRENHEIT 451

Though George Orwell’s life and work life and work continue to hold my attention, especially his collected essays, my interest in what passed for sci-fi years ago pretty much peaked in high school with l984 and Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD.

I’ve never been a great fan of Bradbury’s sci-fi novels. Ironically, though diehard sci-fi fan seem to find Bradbury’s work a little soft, a little too ‘human’ for cosmic consciousness, it’s his very sense of humanity (and story artistry) that I once found and still find most compelling, most worthy of mentioning, in his “mainstream” stuff: short stories, essays, plays, novels. Short stories such as “I’ll See You Never,” The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” and “The Anthem Sprinters.”

And If the great American novel about boyhood in the Midwest is Mark Twain’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN, (as well it should be), the other great American novel dealing with the same subject but set in Waukegan, Illinois, is Ray Bradbury’s, DANDELION WINE—recommended reading every spring. As well as HUCKLEBERRY FINN.

The best collections of Bradbury’s short stories can be found in THE VINTAGE BRADBURY, which includes twenty-two stories and excerpts from DANDELION WINE. As Gilbert Highet states in the Introduction: “Ray Bradbury is one of the most original living American authors....A curious mixture of poetry and colloquialism, [his style] is so brisk and economical...so full of unexpected quirks that it never becomes boring...His work will last.” And indeed it has. This collection has never been out of print, which I bought (first paperback Vintage edition) in 1965 for $1.45. The most recent, tradeback edition goes for $13.95.

Bradbury’s been around a long time. He had this to say in 2002, when he turned 82:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

Last week I turned 82. 82! When I look in the mirror, the person staring back at me is a young boy, with a head and heart filled with dreams and excitement and unquenchable enthusiasm for life’ Sure, he’s got white hair -- so what! People often ask me how I stay so young, how I’ve kept such a “youthful” outlook. The answer is simple: Live a life in which you cram yourself with all kinds of metaphors, all kinds of activities, and all kinds of love. And take time to laugh -- find something that makes you truly happy -- every day of your life. That is what I have done, from my earliest days.

I fell in love with motion pictures when I was three years old and saw “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “The Phantom of the Opera” and “The Lost World.”

I moved on to become intrigued with magicians when I saw Blackstone the Magician on the stage.

Then I read the magazine Amazing Stories when I was eight and saw “Buck Rogers” when I was nine, and later, at thirteen, was impressed by the movie “King Kong.”

My life filled up with these wonderful events and people and images, and they stirred my imagination so that by the time I was twelve I decided to become a writer. Just like that.

Now, all of these miraculous encounters are included in Jerry Weist’s new book BRADBURY: AN ILLUSTRATED LIFE, which Morrow/Avon is publishing this October (just in time for Halloween, my favorite holiday). It’s an incredible book jammed full of two or three hundred color photographs beginning at the start of my life, when as a child I collected books of fairy tales. From there it moves through the middle and later years of my life when I wrote screenplays for motion pictures such as “Moby Dick.” Sometimes I find it hard to believe that my years have held such wonderful adventures; I’ve published thirty books, written thousands of short stories, and written sixty-four television shows for “Ray Bradbury Theater.”

The act of writing is, for me, like a fever -- something I must do. And it seems I always have some new fever developing, some new love to follow and bring to life.

I’ve never doubted myself; I’ve always been so completely devoted to libraries and books and authors that I couldn’t stop to consider for a moment that I was being foolish. I only knew that writing was in itself the only way to live and I think Jerry’s book proves that.

Currently my film “A Sound of Thunder” is being filmed in Czechoslovakia and should be in theaters some time next summer. I have high hopes for it, and also for a remake of “Fahrenheit 451,” to be directed by Frank Darabont, who directed “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile.”

I am now finishing a new mystery novel, LET’S ALL KILL CONSTANCE, which will be published in January 2003. Beyond that, I intend to produce several books of essays and poems.

As you can see, I have never stopped writing which means I have never stopped loving. And, so I say, “Happy Birthday to Me!” After all, I’m only 82. There’s so much more to do, to see, to experience, to create. I’d better get busy . . .

-- Ray Bradbury, August 29, 2002

One of his most controversial and popular novels remains FAHRENHEIT 451 (A perfect novel to be read in our present time). You may recall that the main character in FAHRENHEIT 451 is a man by the name of Guy Montag, a fireman, and one of the scenes (which both suggests the threat to great books and tests one’s knowledge of great reading)goes something like this:

“Granger touched Montag’s arm. “Welcome back from the dead.” Montag nodded. Granger went on. “You might as well know all of us, now. This is Fred Clement, former occupant of the Thomas Hardy chair at Cambridge in the years before it became an Atomic Engineering School. This other is Dr. Simmons from U.C.L.A., a specialist in Ortega y Gasset; Professor West here did quite a bit for ethics, an ancient study now, for Columbia University quite some years ago. Reverend Padover here gave a few lectures thirty years ago and lost his flock between one Sunday and the next for his views. He’s been bumming with us some time now. Myself: I wrote a book called The Fingers in the Glove; the Proper Relationship between the Individual and Society, and here I am! Welcome, Montag!”
“I don’t belong with you,” said Montag, at last, slowly. “I’ve been an idiot all the way.”
“We’re used to that. We all made the right kind of mistakes, or we wouldn’t be here. When we were separate individuals, all we had was rage. I struck a fireman when he came to burn my library years ago. I’ve been running every since. You want to join us, Montag?”
“Yes.”
“What have you to offer?”
“Nothing. I thought I had part of the Book of Ecclesiastes and maybe a little of Revelation, but I haven’t even that now.”
“The Book of Ecclesiastes would be fine. Where was it?”
“Here.” Montag touched his head.
“Ah.” Granger smiled and nodded.
“What’s wrong? Isn’t that all right?” said Montag.
“Better than all right; perfect!” Granger turned to the Reverend. “Do we have a Book of Ecclesiastes?”
“One. A man named Harris in Youngstown.”
“Montag.” Granger took Montag’s shoulder firmly. “Walk carefully. Guard your health. If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Ecclesiastes. See how important you’ve become in the last minute!”
“But I’ve forgotten!”
“No, nothing’s ever lost. We have ways to shake down your clinkers for you.”
[“But I tried to remember!”
“Don’t try. It’ll come when we need it. All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there. Simmons here has worked on it for twenty years and now we’ve got the method down to where we can recall anything that’s been read once. Would you like, someday, Montag, to read Plato’s Republic?”
“Of course!”
“I am Plato’s Republic. Like to read Marcus Aurelius? Mr. Simmons is Marcus.”
“How do you do?” said Mr. Simmons.
“Hello,” said Montag.
“I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Guilliver’s Travels\ And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”
Everyone laughed quietly.
“It can’t be,” said Montag.
“It is,” replied Granger, smiling. “We’re book burners, too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they’d be found. Microfilming didn’t pay off; we were always traveling, we didn’t want to bury the film and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law. Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it’s here. And the hour’s late. And the war’s begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors. What do you think, Montag?”
“I think I was blind trying to go at things my way, planting books in firemen’s houses and sending in alarms.”
“You did what you had to do. Carried out on a national scale, it might have worked beautifully. But our way is simpler and, we think, better. All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need intact and safe. We’re not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good. We are model citizens, in our own special way; we walk the old tracks, we lie in the hills at night, and the city people let us be. We’re stopped and searched occasionally, but there’s nothing on our persons to incriminate us. The organization is flexible, very loose, and fragmentary. Some of us have had plastic surgery on our faces and fingerprints. Right now we have a horrible job; we’re waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It’s not pleasant, but then we’re not in control, we’re the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war’s over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.”
“Do you really think they’ll listen then?”
“If not, we’ll just have to wait. We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen. They have to come ’round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Thousands on the roads, the abandoned rail-tracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn’t planned, at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. Then, over a period of twenty years or so, we met each other, traveling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan. The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we mustn’t be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise. Some of us live in small towns. Chapter One of Thoreau’s Walden in Green River, Chapter Two in Willow Farm, Maine. Why, there’s one town in Maryland, only twenty-seven people, no bomb’ll ever touch that town, is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, so many pages to a person. And when the war’s over, someday, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we’ll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.”

Today is the day Attny. Gen. Albert Gonzales went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend President Bush’s domestic surveillance Program.

I thought it might be appropriate to take note of Ray Bradbury’s world and work on this historic American occasion,