Happy 100th Birthday, Ray Bradbury (b. 22 August 1920) 

Ray Bradbury, the lake

“I’ll hold on to the world tight some day. I’ve got one finger on it now; that’s a beginning.”

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. 

~Ray Bradbury (Book: Fahrenheit 451)

[Philo Thoughts]

Cover illustration by Charles Binger

Info from ISFDB

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the rocket man

“Doug,” he said, about five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our towels and heading back along the beach near the surf. “I want you to promise me something.

“Don’t ever be a rocket man.”

I stopped.

“I mean it,” he said, “because when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that. Don’t let it get hold of you.

“You don’t know what it is. Every time I’m out there I think, if I ever get back to Earth I’ll stay there, I’ll never go out again. But I go out and I guess I’ll always go out.”

“I’ve thought about being a Rocket Man for a long time,” I said.

He didn’t hear me. “I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I started trying so damned hard to stay here.”

I remembered him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing and listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and the towns and the land and his family were the only real things and the good things. But I knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion from our front porch.

“Promise me you won’t be like me,” he said.

ray bradbury, maclean's magazine, march 1, 1951