A Chapbook for Burnt-Out Priests, Rabbis, and Ministers

By Ray Bradbury

From the author of Fahrenheit 451, a unique collection of poetry, short stories, and essays that tackles mortality, religion, and the afterlife.

Thought-provoking, full of wonder, and with a touch of Ray Bradbury’s signature sense of humor, this collection bridges science fiction and the arts to religion and taps into the core of intellectual pursuit.

Included are the soulful and over the top “They Have Not Seen The Stars,” “I Live By The Invisible,” “Christ on Other Planets,” “If Only We Had Taller Been,” “Come Whisper Me A Promise,” and so much more.

One of the most celebrated 20th century authors, known for his speculative fiction, Bradbury has crossed genres with a grace possessed only by masters of the craft.His incredibly sharp wit herewith makes this a must-have for fans old and new.

“For Bradbury enthusiasts, religionists and nearly everyone else, here's a delightful scrapbook of poems and essays, familiar summations but no less vital from a brilliant young fantasist grown older but not old.”—Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781635762167

Ray Bradbury

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. An Emmy Award winner for his teleplay The Halloween Tree and an Academy Award nominee, he was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

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Preface

This preface is written in hopes of silencing those who think that such a book as this is an outrageous act of a loose-cannon ego. The simple fact is that some twenty years or so ago, these bits and pieces began to arrive in the mail with notes or long letters from ministers, rabbis and priests who told me that faced with yet another sermon in a long line of sermons they happened across a paragraph in a story of mine or read a poem that expressed an idea that turned on an extra light bulb of no massive wattage but gave some light nevertheless. As time passed a few sermons were given over completely to some notions I had tripped over in finishing a poem or even a novel. To say that I was delighted to have such discoveries in my own work passed on to me, does not in any way describe my feelings. I never planned to wind up in a Unitarian pulpit or a Baptist banquet, much less a Catholic seminar at Loyola University, but suddenly there I was, summoned in from the secular outfield to enliven ceremonies that had, by natural course, become somewhat too familiar to the men who wrote to confess they had need of a friend like me with a supply of devotional metaphors in the coatpocket over my secular heart.

So, as the years passed, this collection grew. I had little to do with it, save to open the arriving letters and find that I had partaken of a funeral mass in Minnesota, and a Baptist outing in Eureka, Illinois. All this was welcome for as a young man of fourteen arriving in Los Angeles I had wandered into local synagogues and cathedrals on Friday nights or weekends, trepidatious but curious to be welcomed by priests or rabbis who seeing my curiosity but trepidation, found me a pew and opened my ears. I could not help but wonder then as now, how they could speak forever, which is to say, several hundred weekends in a row without falling silent or going stone mad. Later on in life, I lectured enough to know the feeling close-on. Great news then to have my new celebratory friends tell me that I had filled in a small but convenient niche on a long Sunday morning or added a semicolon or exclamation mark to a Friday night that looked to never end.

These new friends stumbled over me and in doing so caused me to stumble over an obvious but somehow invisible self. I had written, but not numbered, dozens of celebratory poems, and some few essays, in mid and later life. I had even written about the Saviour on other worlds, and a Cantata with Jerry Goldsmith, the composer, titled CHRISTUS APOLLO. It was time, it seemed to everyone, for me to be truly baptized and take my first Communion. The literary wafers were given as gifts to me along the way from 1954 to here. My first real communion was at the rail of the American Episcopal Cathedral in Paris just a few weeks ago. I swallowed the wafer but forgot to stay for the wine. I will return soon for that. Meanwhile, this book. A gift from others to me. Which now, not very humbly, I pass on to you.

—Ray Bradbury

They Have Not Seen the Stars

They have not seen the stars,

Not one, not one

Of all the creatures on this world

In all the ages since the sands first touched the wind

Not one, not one,

No beast of all the beasts has stood

On meadowland or plain or hill

And known the thrill of looking at those fires;

Our soul admires what they, oh, they, have never known.

Five billion years have flown in turnings of the spheres

But not once in all those years

Has lion, dog, or bird that sweeps the air

Looked there, oh, look. Looked there, ah God, the stars;

Oh, look, look there!

It is as if all time had never been,

Or universe or sun or moon or simple morning light.

Their tragedy was mute and blind, and so remains. Our sight?

Yes, ours? To know now what we are,

But think of it, then choose—now, which?

Born to raw Earth, inhabiting a scene

And all of it, no sooner viewed, erased, gone blind

As if these miracles had never been.

Vast circlings of sounding light, of fire and frost,

And all so quickly seen then quickly lost?

Or us, in fragile flesh, with God’s new eyes

That lift and comprehend and search the skies?

We watch the seasons drifting in the lunar tide

And know the years, remembering what’s died.

Oh, yes, perhaps some birds some nights

Have felt Orion rise and turned their flights

And turned southward

Because star-charts were printed in their sweet genetic dreams—

Or so it seems.

But, see? But really see and know?

And, knowing, want to touch those fires,

To grow until the mighty brow of man Lamarckian-tall

Knocks earthquakes, striking moon,

Then Mars, then Saturn’s rings;

And, growing, hope to show

All other beasts just how.

To fly with dreams instead of ancient wings.

So, think on this: we’re first! the only ones

Whom God has honored with his rise of suns.

For us as gifts Aldebaran, Centauri, homestead Mars.

Wake up, God says. Look there. Go fetch.

The stars. Oh, Lord, much thanks. The stars!

Shaw!

Scanning the Universe with its multifold of stars, the humanoid robot George Bernard Shaw at last spoke to describe the history of Mankind:

What are we? Why, in the long night of Time, we are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible! The Life Force experimenting with forms. The Universe shouting itself alive. We are one of the shouts. Creation turns in its abyss. We have bothered it, dreaming ourselves to shapes. The void is filled with slumbers: ten billion on a billion on a billion bombardments of light and mindless stuff that knows not itself, that sleeps moving and moves but finally to make an eye and waken on itself. Among so much that is flight and ignorance, we are the blind power that gropes like Lazarus from a billion-light-year tomb. We summon ourselves. We say, O Lazarus Life Force, truly come ye forth! So the Cosmos, a motion of deaths, fumbles to reach across Time to find its own flesh and know it to be ours. We touch both ways and find each other miraculous because we are One.

And so, good friends, in a Christmas that is eternal and a New Year that is forever, this wish of love, for all.

We Are the Reliquaries of Lost Time

We are the reliquaries of lost time;

Until our age, the rage to know, collect,

And try at saving