Thrown out of Eden Now we headlong humans Sinners sinned against Return. Tossed from the central sun We with our own concentric fires Blaze and burn. Once at the hub of wakening And vast starwheel, For centuries long-lost, and made to feel Unwanted, orphaned, mindless, Driven forth to grassless gardens, Dead and desert sea, We were shut out by comet grooms like Kepler Galileo Galilei Whose short-sight probing light-years Upped and said: The Hub’s not here! So shot man through the head And worse, each starblind prophet killed a part, Snugged shut our souls, Chopped short our reach, Entombed our living heart. But now we bastard sons of time Pronounce ourselves anew And strike fire-hammer blows To change tomorrow’s clime, its meteor snows. Our rocket selfhood grows To give dull facts a shake, break data down To climb the Empire State and thundercry the town But more! reach up and strike And claim from Heaven The Garden we were shunted from, For now, space-driven We fit, fix, force and fuse, Re-hub the systems vast Respoke starwheel And at the spiraled core Plant foot, full fire-shod And thus saints feel Our yeast like flesh of God. We march back to Olympus, Our plain-bread flesh burns gold! We clothe ourselves in flame And trade new myths for old. The Greek gods christen us With ghosts of comet swords; God smiles and names us thus: "Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!“
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We March Back To Olympus
Ray Bradbury 1920-2012
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Graphic - Daniel Maidman (B.1975)
“I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
An illustration sketch for chapter one of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.
I'd say there's more to come as I dog-eared a bunch of scenes I'd love to draw, but I had to return the book to my brother-in-law.
There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight - Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck - tonight you could almost taste time.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
"It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason."
– Ray Bradbury
From our stacks: Illustration for "A Sound of Thunder," from The Golden Apples of the Sun. Ray Bradbury. With Drawings by Joe Mugnaini. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972.
My heart did not beat, it exploded.
I did not warm to a subject, I boiled over.
I have always run fast and yelled loud about a list of great and magical things I knew I simply could not live without.
15-year-old Ray Bradbury with Marlene Dietrich, 1935
“I was madly in love with Hollywood… I had been roller skating all over the town and was absolutely obsessed with getting autographs from all those glamorous stars. It was great. I saw really big MGM stars like Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, Ronald Colman. Or I would hang out all day in front of Paramount or Columbia, then rush to the Brown Derby to look at the stars coming in or out of there. I saw Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen – everyone who’d been to the coast. Mae West appeared every Friday with her bodyguard. …I still have these autographs, and the wheels from the rollers also survived to these days. Almost all of those people I had met are already gone, but by some miracle Marlene and George survived. The light coming from these photos is like a repeated session of my life about a slightly stupid, but always loyal boy who terribly didn’t want to grow up.”
- Ray Bradbury
"do your own bit of saving. that way, if you drown, at least you'll die knowing you were heading for shore."