Take Me Home, Mr. Bradbury

        Mr. Ray Bradbury, the recently deceased wordsmith and science fiction heavyweight, believed in starting every day with writing. Whatever it was, story or thought, however it came out, junk or gold, he started his day with his pen to paper (or rather finger to key). While Mr. Bradbury undoubtedly influenced many of those in my generation and the one before mine, there is good reason to believe that those of us, who absorbed Ray’s words in our childhood years, do not heed his words as adults; myself among the best of them.

The week before his death, The New Yorker released their Science Fiction edition in which Bradbury had written a one page essay on his induction into the world of the fantastic and mysterious. The article, somewhat sadly (and ironically), titled “Take Me Home”, is about Mr. Bradbury’s entry into the science fiction business and the belief in other worlds, particularly his young self’s most painful desire for them to “take [him] home.” The way young Bradbury coped with his earthbound prison was to write; to write every day. Being a (self-described) writer, the article hit me hard. I do not write often enough and when I do, it is no more than streams-of-consciousness or half-baked short stories. With the corporate life I lead and the eight hours I am stuck in a grey cubicle, I simply cannot summon the will to go to that pen and paper (or finger to key).


With my self-pity in one hand and the need to further torment myself; I started reading about my new-found teacher. After years of reading his fiction, I found out a lot about his reality, and his convictions and his influences but most importantly that he never attended college. Instead Mr. Bradbury liked to say that he attended libraries, which he viewed as his own version of college. He read and devoured the sections (quite like Rohl Dahl’s little literati Matilda) in the libraries and denounced formal education.

While I did attend college, I understand Mr. Bradbury’s sentiment about formal education. I learned a great deal about the worlds of socializing and networking over my four years in University. However, in payment I had the literary stuffing beaten out of me. Every conviction and every notion I came up with from the books I read to the great thinkers I listened to, was lost in the vain hope for higher grades and recommendations from professors, who valued my ‘comments’ in class but ridiculed said comments with poor grades discreetly on my papers. I seethed through my first semester and quickly learnt the game there was to play, and thus graduated Magna Cum Laude. From there I spent a summer trying my hand at my other passion, pastry, in a New York restaurant but gave it up to go back to my true love, literature. I thought that I hit the jackpot when I landed a job in the publishing sector. It has been there that I have furthered to shred at my convictions and my passion for the preservation of literature, in a world of blogs and talking heads.

            It has been a long two years of self-discovery, self-pity and second guessing. Through trial and error I have chipped away at the core of who I am, at the literary mind I always knew was beneath the veil of uncertainty and at the heart full of conviction I never would have thought could stop beating in my chest.  You can see it my face, in the tired circles beneath my dull eyes and in the sudden slump of my shoulders, heavy from carrying the burden of my failed efforts and the bounty of my regrets.  Which is why from today on I am going to heed Mr. Bradbury’s advice and I am going to write every single day. No matter what it is, no matter how it sounds, I will write it and I will print it (and hope that nobody finds it or, god forbid, knows who I am). It may not always be long and it may not always be of literary value but, at least it will get me going and hopefully, revive my poor passion-deprived heart and mind.

Day One.