Pentru cine încă nu a aflat încă trista veste, Ray Bradbury, omul datorită căruia o să ne gândim de două ori înainte să ardem o carte, a murit săptămâna trecută. Avea 91 de ani.
La aflarea veştii, Danny Karapetian, nepotul lui, povestea pentru io9:
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.”
Despre Fahrenheit 451, dar şi despre stilul lui Bradbury la modul general, am vorbit deja mai demult. Ştiţi cât ne place. De data asta asta, însă, am dat peste două scrisori ale lui Bradbury care cred că sunt extrem grăitoare pentru atitudinea lui față de viață. Bradbury ne spune, cu un entuziasm pe care n-ai cum să nu-l percepi, chiar şi într-o scrisoare, că trebuie să iubim cărţile, dar şi că trebuie să facem, întotdeauna, ceea ce vrem şi ne place să facem.
Iar aici găsiţi ultimul lui material, publicat în The New Yorker pe 4 iunie. Un text dulce despre baloane, pierdere şi nostalgiile copilăriei.
Despre cea mai importantă decizie pe care a trebuit s-o ia vreodată:
most important decision i ever made came at age 9…i was collecting BUCK ROGERS comic strips, 1929, when my 5th grade classmates made fun of me. I tore up the strips. A week later, broke into tears. Why was I crying? I wondered. Who die? Me, was the answer. I have torn up the future. What to do about it? Start collecting BUCK ROGERS again. Fall in love with the Future! I did just that. And after that never listened to one damnfool idiot classmate who doubted me! What did I learn? To be myself and never let others, prejudiced, interfer with my life. Kids, do the same. Be your own self. Love what YOU love. (de aici)
Despre cât de importantă a fost o bibliotecă, și compania cărților – “prietenii de pe rafturi”, în scrierea romanului Fahrenheit 451:
Dear Shawna Thorup:
I’m glad to hear that you good people will be celebrating my book, “Fahrenheit 451.” I thought you might want to hear how the first version of it, 25,000 words and which appeared in a magazine, got done.
I needed an office and had no money for one. Then one day I was wandering around U.C.L.A. and I heard typing down below in the basement of the library. I discovered there was a typing room where you could rent a typewriter for ten cents a half hour. I moved into the typing room along with a bunch of students and my bag of dimes, which totaled $9.80, which I spent and created the 25,000 word version of “The Fireman” in nine days. How could I have written so many words so quickly? It was because of the library. All of my friends, all of my loved ones, were on the shelves above and shouted, yelled and shrieked at me to be creative. So I ran up and down the stairs, finding books and quotes to put in my “Fireman” novella. You can imagine how exciting it was to do a book about book burning in the very presence of the hundreds of my beloveds on the shelves. It was the perfect way to be creative; that’s what the library does.
I hope you enjoy reading my passionate output, which became larger a few years later and became popular, thank God, with a lot of people. (de aici)
