in memory of Ray Bradbury

Wednesday morning, just as I was uploading a video I had been rendering overnight, I took a look at the news and there, topmost, in just an hour before, was the news of Ray Bradbury's passing.

I was shaken deeply and I guess I still am. It felt a friend had passed away. I had never realized his importance to me was really so deep. The whole of my childhood came back to me, the joy of discovering his stories and the wonderful journeys I took with him.

I can vividly recall the copy of The Illustrated Man (Kuvitettu mies, title of the Finnish translation) on my parent's bookshelf. How luring it was. I must have been about eight or nine years old. I had been reading mostly formulaic children's adventure stories, and just started the transition to more ambitious reading with Clarke's 2001: Space Odyssey. Holding "The Illustrated Man" in my hands, I knew this was something else, something new and exciting, a great adventure to come. And it was. 

The stories sucked me in like nothing before. After finishing the book I continued to read any Finnish translation I could find in the city libraries. And to this day I am still amazed by the joy that shines through his writing. A feeling that writing in itself is not just labor, but an exciting journey, that words can flow out, just as music can flow out, almost as if they have a will of their own. And that feeling always stayed with me when I would venture into my own fantasies, when I’d sit at midnight in my room, filling up notebooks or typing away with a Macintosh.

To me Ray was always like a mysterious spirit. I knew him through his words, the deep pools of imagination, the beautiful dance of his sentences on paper, but I never read about him as a person. I did not know that he had lived 50 years in the same house in L.A, that he didn't drive, that he wrote Farenheit 451 in the basement of UCLA library in nine days.

Therefore I had no clue that as I was spending my first two months in the US, in Los Angeles, they were the last two months of his life. That I was wondering around the same campus grounds he had, sitting on lawns and benches and writing in my notebook. That he had been a familiar face in the city’s libraries and bookstores. That he was living his last days just few miles from where I was staying. And now he is gone. 

There was something beautiful written about him online (though he himself might have resented that, considering internet a great distraction):

"He said that God put people on Earth so we could hear the trees fall in the forests."

Seeing the fantastic in the ordinary, the wonders in the everyday life, is perhaps just the reason why Bradbury was so special to me, and to many others. He helps us see that life is as mundane as we make it to be. That adventures are ours to embark on any day we choose. Many of the fantasies he dreamt up did not exist in our world, but they exist now, inside the covers of books, waiting in the shelves of libraries to jump out and take root in the reader's mind, even when he is no longer here. That's a real miracle.

I wanted to finally launch this project this week to mark the start of a new year and a new cycle in my life. But instead, now I want to dedicate it to Ray. I hope that the magic of his work will continue to remind me to see and celebrate the miraculous in the world. That is all I have ever wanted to convey, and the mentor I never knew and never met, has again reminded me of this essential truth.