“ … ”

I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree; you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers.

I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals.

mary rose o’reilley

What if every little thing you do subtly alters the course of world history? You do know that it does, right?

wanderer

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

Ray Bradbury is riding his bicycle on a different path today. A long life lived doing what he loved, and loving what he was doing. I had just finished re-reading Fahrenheit 451 last month…there’s a post on May 13th.

In the spring of 1950, Ray spent $9.50 in dimes to write and finish the first draft of said book. He had done most of his typing in the family garage, but was driven out by loving children who insisted on coming around to the rear window and singing and tapping on the pane. He had to choose between finishing a story or playing. “I chose to play of course”, which endangered the family income. An office had to be found. He couldn’t afford one. Finally, he located the typing room in the basement of the library at the University of California, Los Angeles. (The following quote from ‘Afterword’ in Fahrenheit 451, Random House edition):

“There, in neat rows, were a score or more of old Remington or Underwood typewriters which rented out at a dime for a half hour. You thrust your dime in, the clock ticked madly, and you typed wildly, to finish before the half hour ran out. I finished the first draft in roughly nine days. At 25,000 words, it was half the novel it eventually would become.

Between investing dimes and going insane when the typewriter jammed and whipping pages in and out of the device, I wandered upstairs. There I strolled, lost in love, down the corridors, and through the stacks, touching books, pulling volumes out, turning pages, thrusting volumes back, drowning in all the good stuffs that are the essence of libraries. What a place, don’t you agree, to write a novel about burning books in the Future!”          

wanderer, enjoy the ride, Ray…

 Have you considered the possibility that everything you believe is wrong, not merely off a bit, but totally wrong, nothing like things as they really are?

federico moramarco