Ray Bradbury



               Take Haste To Live: An Afterword

    

          When I was eight years old, in 1928, an incredible event 

occurred on the back wall outside the Academy motion picture theater 

in Waukegan, Illinois. An advertising broadside, some thirty feet long 

and twenty feet high, dramatized Black-stone the Magician in half a 

dozen miraculous poses: sawing a lady in half; tied to an Arabian 

cannon that exploded, taking him with it; dancing a live handkerchief 

in midair; causing a birdcage with a live canary to vanish between his 

fingers; causing an elephant to . . . well, you get the idea. I must 

have stood there for hours, frozen with awe. I knew then that someday 

I must become a magician.

    That's what happened, didn't it? I'm not a science fiction, 

fantasy, magic-realism writer of fairy tales and surrealist poems. 

Quicker Than the Eye may well be the best title I have ever conjured 

for a new collection. I pretend to do one thing, cause you to blink, 

and in the instant seize twenty bright silks out of a bottomless hat.

    How does he do that? may well be asked. I really can't say. I 

don't write these stories, they write me. Which causes me to live with 

a boundless enthusiasm for writing and life that some misinterpret as 

optimism.

    Nonsense. I am merely a practitioner of optimal behavior, which 

means behave yourself; listen to your Muses, get your work done, and 

enjoy the sense that you just might live forever.

    I don't have to wait for inspiration. It jolts me every morning. 

Just before dawn, when I would prefer to sleep in, the damned stuff 

speaks between my ears with my Theater of Morning voices. Yes, yes, I 

know, that sounds awfully artsy, and no, no, I am not preaching some 

sort of Psychic Summons. The voices exist because I stashed them there 

every day for a lifetime by reading, writing, and living. They 

accumulated and began to speak soon after high school.

    In other words, I do not greet each day with a glad cry but am 

forced out of bed by these whispering nags, drag myself to the 

typewriter, and am soon awake and alive as the notion/fancy/concept 

quits my ears, runs down my elbows and out my fingers. Two hours 

later, a new story is done that, all night, hid asleep behind my 

medulla oblongata.

    That, don't you agree, is not optimism. It's behavior. Optimal.

    I dare not oppose these morning voices. If I did, they would 

ransack my conscience all day. Besides, I am as out of control as a 

car off a cliff. What began as a numbed frenzy before breakfast, ends 

with elation at noon lunch.

    How did I find these metaphors? Let me count the ways:

    You discover your wife is pregnant with your first child soon to 

be born, so you name the embryonic presence "Sascha" and converse with 

this increasingly bright fetus that evolves into a story that you love 

but no one wants. So here it is.

    You wonder whatever happened to Dorian Gray's portrait. Your 

second thoughts grow to an outsize horror by nightfall. You upchuck 

this hairball into your typewriter.

    Some of these stories "happened" to me. "Quicker Than the Eye" was 

part of a magic show I attended where, with dismay, I saw someone much 

like myself being made a fool of onstage.

    "No News, or What Killed the Dog?" was a Victrola record I played 

all day every day when I was five, until the neighbors offered to 

break me or the record, choose.

    "That Woman on the Lawn" was first a poem that then turned into a 

story about my mother as a young and needful woman; a topic we care to 

discuss only with euphemisms.

    "Another Fine Mess" resulted from my writing "The Laurel and Hardy 

Love Affair." There had to be a sequel, because when I arrived in 

Ireland forty years ago, the Irish Times announced LAUREL AND HARDY, 

ONE TIME ONLY, IN PERSON! FOR THE IRISH ORPHANS. OLYMPIA THEATER, 

DUBLIN. I rushed to the theater and bought the last ticket, front row 

center!

    The curtain rose and there they were, Stan and Ollie, doing all 

their old, sweet, wondrous routines. I sat with happy tears streaming 

down my face. Later I went backstage and stood by their dressing room 

door watching them greet friends. I didn't introduce myself. I just 

wanted to warm my hands and heart. After twenty minutes of ambience 

bathing, I slipped away. Thus "Another Fine Mess."

    "Unterderseaboat Doktor" is an example of people not hearing 

themselves talk. A writer friend at lunch some years back described 

his psychiatrist, a former submarine captain in Hitler's undersea 

fleet. "Holy God," I cried, "give me a pencil!" I scribbled a title 

and finished the tale that night. My writer friend hated me for weeks.

    "Last Rites" wrote itself because I am the greatest lover of other 

writers, old or new, who ever lived. I have never been jealous of any 

writer, I only wanted to write and dream like them. That makes for an 

enormous list, some of them first-class ladies as well as writers 

first class: Willa Cather, Jessamyn West, Katherine Anne Porter, 

Eudora Weelty, and, long before her current fame, Edith Wharton. "Last 

Rites" shuttles in Time to pay my respects to three of my heroes, Poe, 

Melville, and a third writer, nameless until the finale. It crazed me 

to perceive that these giants died thinking they were to be buried 

unknown and unread. I had to invent a Time Machine to celebrate them 

on their deathbeds.

    Some of the stories are self-evident. "At the End of the Ninth 

Year" is the sort of quasi-scientific factoid we all discuss a dozen 

times, but neglect to write.

    "The Other Highway" lies beside the main route heading north from 

Los Angeles. It has all but vanished under grass, bushes, trees, and 

avalanched soil. Here and there you can still bike it for some few 

hundred yards before it melts into the earth.

    "Once More, Legato" spontaneously combusted one afternoon when I 

heard a treeful of birds orchestrating Berlioz and then Albeniz.

    If you know the history of Paris during the 1870s' Commune and 

Haussmann, who tore it down and built it back to the wonder it is now, 

and if you have experienced some Los Angeles earthquakes, you' could 

guess the genesis of "Zaharoff/Richter Mark V." During the last High 

Shake, two years ago, I thought: My God, the damn fools built the city 

on the San Andreas Fault! My next thought: what if they built it that 

way on purpose?!

    Two hours later, the story was cooling on the windowsill.

    That's not all, but it should do.

    My final advice to myself; the boy magician grown old, and you?

    When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses:

    don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the 

shower to align your wits.

    Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure 

cure for life rampant and death most real.

    Make haste to live.

    Oh, God, yes.

    Live. And write. With great haste.