Wednesday, December 23, 2009

"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way" Jaun Ramon Jimenez



"I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up on one another. Do you notice how people hurt eachother nowadays?"

It is a crime to call this book Sci-fi, but that is it's given genre. Maybe in 1953, it seemed so far from the realm of possibility, but this is (give or take  a detail here or there) the world we are living in. That alone makes Ray Bradbury's insite, intuition and ability to see the biggest of the big pictures, all the more remarkable.
When is the last time you read it? I think it was middle-school required reading for most. I picked it up again years later and then again just the other day. It wasn't until this point in my life, in my adulthood, in my acceptance of certain things and unwillingness to accept others, that I finally truly and earth-shatteringly understood what I'd been reading. It is brilliant and poignant and yes, I'm aware that's it's a classic, so I'm running the very real risk of sounding ridiculously cliched - that's okay with me though. This is one of those novels that simply must be stressed every so often. It is timeless and has a message so undeniably strong that it's a wonder how people continue to live their lives the way that they do.
Over half a century ago (not to mention a thousand other times in a thousand other ways) we were so clearly warned. Easily one of the most profound truths I'll ever have the honor of knowing. I suggest reading it, and I mean really really reading it while you still can; before somebody deems this sort of inconvenient logic "no good for us" and it's taken off of our required reading lists in school, or out of the Sci-fi section; before you can't find it in any section, anywhere. If we "hope" for "change," if we want to be heard, we must first learn to listen.
"I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going...do you know what?...People don't talk about anything...No. Not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else."


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