dual personalities

This past weekend I read Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Written in 1957, the novel takes place in the summer of 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, based on Bradbury’s childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois.  The main character of the story is Douglas Spaulding, a 12-year-old boy loosely patterned after Bradbury. I found it diverting and worth reading.

Of course, it sparked my curiosity about Waukegan. Waukegan is kind of a depressing place these days, but back in the days when Bradbury was a boy, it was quite idyllic–at least in his memory.

I found this blogpost from 2011 about Waukegan which has a current photo of Ray Bradbury Park and the “ravine” which figures prominently in the book. I had a hard time visualizing it, so this helped me a lot!

(It is amazing what you can find on the internet when you take the time to look!)

One of Bradbury’s themes is the necessity for keeping track of things, of noticing things and another is the relentless passing of time.

“It won’t work,’ Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. ‘No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”

He writes about what happiness is and what it means to be alive. All good things to contemplate. Clearly he was still contemplating them a few weeks before he died, when this was published in The New Yorker.

It all reminded me of this song by Gregory Alan Isakov

What are you reading?

*Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine