Quotation of the Week (17/09)

Another quotation from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, which I'm reading slowly...

"War's never a winning thing. You lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for the terms."

(said by an old colonel, when the boys ask him to tell them about "a battle won")

The Age Thing

My "Quotation of the Week" for this week (16/09, see post below), from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, is from a chapter about a 72 year old woman, who is trying to convince some children, that she, too, was once a little girl their age. She shows them some things she has kept – a ring, a comb, a picture – but they refuse to believe her. There is no proof, in their eyes, that the picture is not of some other person. In the end, it is the old woman who has to give in, remembering a discussion she once had with her husband (it is his words in the quotation). The only way she can become friends with the children is to "let go of her past" and agree with them that she has always been seventy-two:

At last they were good friends.
"How old are you, Mrs. Bentley?"
"Seventy-two."
"How old were you fifty years ago?"
"Seventy-two."

This is of course a little extreme, but dealing with time is a major theme in this novel: both children and old people are looking for ways to preserve their memories as well as catching the moment. (Making dandelion wine is one symbol of it: "Every time you bottle it, you got a whole chunk of 1928 put away, safe." )

When I first entered those lines into my quotation notebook, about being forever "trapped in the present", I was in my mid-twenties. Now I'm approaching my mid-fifties, and I'm still trying to figure out whether I really agree with the quotation or not. I do agree with the first sentence: "No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now." And probably, when I was nine, I found it hard to quite imagine what it would be like to be old. I do remember my grandmother showing me pictures of herself as a little girl, and finding it hard to really make the connection. As one grows older, though, surely the present self must still include all of the past selves? But at the same time we cannot go back; we cannot skip over the experiences we have already gathered; all we can do is keep adding to them, in the present. "You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen."

Click on the label Dandelion Wine below for more quotes from this book.

Quotation of the Week (16/09)

"No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seveny. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or and old now, but there is no other now to be seen."
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Quotation of the Week (15/09)

"You do things and don't watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you're doing and it's the first time, really. --- In other words you do an old familiar thing, like bottling dandelion wine, and you put that under Rites And Ceremonies. And then you think about it, and what you think, crazy or not, you put under Discoveries And Revelations."

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Quotation of the Week (14/09)

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And after all, isn't that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people's heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that's how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.

Ray Bradbury

These words of wisdom are from the 1974 introduction to Ray Bradbury's semi-autobiographical novel Dandelion Wine (originally published in 1957). This is one of my favourite books ever since I first read it back in my teens. My old Swedish copy printed in 1972 fell apart recently when I took it out to look something up. I sent for a new one in English now, and it turned out to include this introduction entitled "Just This Side of Byzantium", in which Bradbury looks back on the writing process behind the book. That made me look forward even more to rereading the whole novel now, in the original language!