I learned to read pretty early in life. Once I got past Dick and Jane in kindergarten (“kinnygartin” if New Jersey is your first language), I devoured books like other kids ate candy. Overwhelmingly, my read of choice was science fiction. The first books I remember reading after kinnygartin were the Tom Swift novels, which were basically The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew…IN SPAAAAAAACE! The first “real” book that I can recall reading was “The War of the Worlds.” It terrified me. I had dreams of being chased by bloodthirsty (literally) Martians riding giant walking barstools. But I was also hooked on SF.

Then one day I read a story about a sea monster...

Then and now, SF was about the ideas, the concepts.  Occasionally the characters were extremely interesting. The great SF authors of my youth, such as Asimov, Silverberg and Heinlein had excellent, cohesive story structure, but even among the notables, prose was not a big concern. It had to be clear and concise, but it wasn’t necessary to be beautiful.

Then one day I read a story about a sea monster which contained this passage:

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like the trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.”

In these few sentences, Ray Bradbury encapsulated loneliness and isolation as well as any writer ever has. To read it, and “The Fog Horn” in its entirety, is to know, to feel, the burden of solitude and of age, of your years slipping away unfilled. It moved me deeply as a kid of ten. Reading that story again after decades, it moves me still. The difference is, now I know why.

I had never read anything or anyone like it before. The adjectives and descriptions (“…stood in the sound of the ocean...”) that make you feel you are there, part of the tale, with the cold wind cutting through your clothing, the empty beach chilling your heart. The clever use of conjunctions to set a rhythm, a syncopation. The sentences, often longer than average, sinusoidal, like a person’s thoughts, or a conversation between close friends or lovers. I knew immediately that I had met my Muse. If I wrote, I wanted to sound like that. I wanted to write like Ray Bradbury.

And it was not a fluke, a note he hit every once in a while. Ray used words like a skilled marksman, taking aim at your soul. He wanted you to share his characters emotional states, not just take in the action.

Later in the same story:

“That’s life for you,” said McDunn. “Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can hurt you no more.”

I was ten or twelve, but Ray led me to concepts that kids seldom are aware of, like aging and eternity.

From “The Lake,” in which a man returns to the beach where his childhood friend and sweetheart had drowned many years before:

“I thought: People grow. I have grown. But she has not changed. She is still small. She is still young. Death does not permit growth or change. She still has golden hair. She will be forever young and I will love her forever, oh God, I will love her forever.”

In the years of my Maria madness, those last two examples often whispered, soft and ragged, in my ear.

There are far too many lovely Bradbury passages to list. Pick up “The October Country” or “Dandelion Wine.” Pretty much anything he ever wrote is sprinkled with pure, emotional beauty.

Funny thing is, in writing this, I realized that, sometimes, in my cadences and descriptions, if you listen carefully, there is, maybe, hopefully, a faint echo of Ray Bradbury.