"A critic a few years back...wrote...wondering how i could have been born and raise in Waukegan...and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and how depressing the coal docks and railyards...i had noticed them and...was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about."
- Ray Bradbury Dandelion Wine (page ix)
"In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about."
- page x
"The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods, and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all, isn't that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside peoples' heads to look out at the [darned] fool miracle (i think he means yourself), and say: oh, so that's how you see it!? Well, now, i must remember that.
Here is my celebration, then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial type writer and wrote his first 'novel'."
- page xii
Why write? Why write when it makes an unrealistic, way-too-beautiful picture of the world around us? when we think up for ourselves such high expectations? when we beautify the things that are simple and expand upon matters that don't seem to matter all that much? Becuase when you write. When you write like that. It reflects something in the very depths of your heart. That we were programmed and created with a desire and a knowledge in our hearts that there truly is a place that beautiful. Even the most secluded of slaves can write about freedom. In our hearts we can picture just a glimpse of the beautiful land that awaits us. And so we write. Not to be unrealistic. Oh how that word limits so many good things... and bad alike. But no. We write for hope. We write because of assurance. We write from the depths of what we know to be true. The simple is beautified because anything more complex would be confusing. The simple is beautified because wisdom lies much of the time in silence. The simple is beautified because beauty doesn't have to be a complex production. So many of us spend our lives trying to make the lives we're spending so much more beautiful. We add and add and add and add til we think we've created a masterpiece. Yet in the end we end up finding out- that it would have been just as beautiful if we just thought the things we started with were beautiful in the first place. Make-up sometimes removes the raw truth and honesty. That true beauty is natural things covered up and bejeweled. True beauty is authenticity- taking the simple and changing your state of thinking to seeing it as 'beautiful'. Which is more of a miraculous, breath-taking change: to take something you deem physically 'not beautiful' and make it more beautiful yourself? or to let the thing itself sit around in your mind for a while and show you what it really is and then end up creating a beautiful change in your inner thoughts about what you think about it- taking your thoughts from degrading and judgemental to joyful and appreciative, not of things that COULD BE, but of the things that ALREADY ARE? Which is better? I say the second. If we fail to realize the true beauty of the things already before us, how will we every be able to judge whether or not the thing we've created is, in fact, truly beautiful? So we take the simple, the good and the bad about it, and we deem them both beautiful. Because we know that one day the bad will be changed to good and the good will remain and that physical beauty is fleeting, but a changed mind and a changed heart will last forever and impact generations to come. That is why we write.
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