R Is For Rocket, by Ray Bradbury
The short story collection R Is For Rocket is designed to appeal to young adults (our current nomenclature for children who read), especially young boys growing up in the dawn of the Space Age. Reading it now made this once-young man cry several times, both for the limpid understanding inherent in Ray Bradbury’s prose, and also for the wistful nostalgia—some intentional, some caused by subsequent events—of these tales which mostly concern the fierce optimism of humans determined to face the future with heads held high.
Thus it was that the title story, “R Is for Rocket”, is the first fiction I have read in quite a while which made me begin to cry, even though I was reading on my lunch break at work, with co-workers around me. Somehow, the deceptive simplicity of Bradbury’s writing triggered an almost autonomous sadness for the lost dreams of youth, which in this case are compounded by the loss of the hopefulness that once seemed integral to the American Dream. The story relates in first person the powerful dream of a teenager who thinks constantly of becoming an astronaut, who dreams of it, who broods about it, who feels the pull of space travel almost as physically as the apple felt the attraction of gravity that urged it onto Newton’s pate. The young narrator and his best buddy share this urge to the stars, always have, even though their other childhood friends seem to have outgrown this dream.
Part of the power of Bradbury’s prose is his uncanny ability to capture, or to recapture, the tidal moods and overwhelming thoughts of a young man. To be frank, the likeness to Gertrude Stein’s writing and stream-of-consciousness and lack of punctuation or separation between one thought and another used to annoy me no end. Strangely enough, what would fascinate me when reading William S. Burroughs seemed cloying when reading Ray Bradbury. Yet Bradbury always knows just what he is doing, and knows just how much streaming run-on sentence first-person consciousness is enough, and when to return to the plot and the story—which is another thing Bradbury always has. And in this case, the lucid dreaming of a young boy is shown by the author in all its heartbreaking agony and soaring aspiration, and we are truly allowed to watch a young boy becoming a young man right before our eyes. This short story is magic.
Many—most—of the stories in this collection have the same preternatural power, and though you may have read them before (most of these tales were collected previously in other Bradbury anthologies, including The Illustrated Man which you’ve doubtless already read), they are well worth reading again. Two other stories made me cry, and only one story made me check the page count to see how long until it would be over. (This was “Frost and Fire”, which is still interesting, and needs its length to tell itself.)
But the power of that first eponymous story of this paperback anthology lingered quite a while, and I had to compose myself somewhat before putting away the detritus of my lunch and returning to work. But not only because of the persuasiveness of Bradbury’s prose. I sat there after reading that opening tale quite bereft and sad, sad for the lost dream of the 20th Century, a dream of progress and hope for humanity which has turned to dissolving starch under our gluttonous tongues. Though we taste sweetness from our apps and our MyPhones and FlexBoxes and the TweeterSlams and the InterWebby tubes and all, we have lost a staunch fierceness which once sent a dozen men to step upon the moon. Twelve humans, all white men in their thirties or forties, trod upon that not-so-distant planet (a mere quarter of a million miles away) and now … no more. Two score and eight years separate us from the last steps on another world, and it seems as if much more than a century has passed since those halcyon days. We have lost so much. And it is that loss I mourned there in the small break room with its linoleum floor and fluorescent lighting, with each person socially distanced around me looking at phones which held computers thousands and thousands of times more powerful that the machines which enabled those dozen souls to trod upon the distant Moon. I was promised flying cars, and instead have been given Dark Mode. Reading Bradbury’s stories returned to me, at least, the powerful dreams of an earlier age, even if I have had to learn to live without dreaming.