# Rest in Peace Ray Bradbury



## Terry D (Jun 6, 2012)

One of the finest writers of the last century has died.  Ray Bradbury wrote science fiction and fantasy with a warmth and humanity which touched millions of lives.  He's one of my favorites.

Iconic science fiction writer Ray Bradbury dies at 91 - books - TODAY.com


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## Bloggsworth (Jun 6, 2012)

Seconded.


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## Deleted member 33527 (Jun 6, 2012)

Rest In Peace. You were a great writer and inspiration to me.


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## Elowan (Jun 6, 2012)

Dreamworx95 said:


> Rest In Peace. You were a great writer and inspiration to me.



Amen


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## Sam (Jun 6, 2012)

Sad day for readers _and _writers. Great man and a world-class writer. RIP, Ray.


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## KangTheMad (Jun 6, 2012)

*RIP Ray Bradbury*

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles

So Ray Bradbury is dead.


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## Terry D (Jun 6, 2012)

Here are some quotes by Ray I thought folks might appreciate:

You fail only if you stop writing.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
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​


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## Sunny (Jun 6, 2012)

I was recently introduced to his writing from someone who loved his writing on this forum. 

I just fell in love with his poetic style, with his beautiful prose. Not very many people write like him, and I'm so thankful that I got to read some of his stories. 

What a great mind he had.


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## squidtender (Jun 6, 2012)

The world is a darker place without him. He will be missed


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## Kyle R (Jun 6, 2012)

He was the reason I became a writer.

I still look to his stories today to be inspired and remind myself of what it looks like to see a true master of the craft.

I'm sorry he's gone, but everytime I read his words it's as if he's right there, prodding you the ribs, coaxing you to see how wonderful life is if you just take the time to look.


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## Terry D (Jun 6, 2012)

I was going to devote my writing time tonight to reading a couple of Ray's stories -- I have The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and The Toynbee Convector sitting on my desk beside me -- but I realized that if Bradbury knew I was spending writing time perusing old stories he'd probably tell me to get to work.  So I did.  I did my night's writing -- Ray might call it plucking dandelion fluff from an early June breeze -- and now I'll start reading.


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## Tiamat (Jun 7, 2012)

This is utterly disappointing.  Bradbury has always been one of my absolute favorite authors.  But on the bright side, being an author of so many published works, any time we miss him, we can just pick up one of his books and see him come to life again, if only for awhile.


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## Edward G (Jun 7, 2012)

He said he was happy because he had always worked for himself and got to do what he loved doing. Damn if that ain't the truth. I grew up with _Farenheit 451_. He wrote a classic. What I wouldn't give to duplicate his success in life. 

RIP Mr. Bradbury.:-({|=


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## Amber Leaf (Jun 7, 2012)

RIP. 

It's a shame but he did live to a long age. 

We had to cremate my friend yesterday who died at 29. RIP Nick.


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## Terry D (Jun 7, 2012)

Amber Leaf said:


> RIP.
> 
> It's a shame but he did live to a long age.
> 
> We had to cremate my friend yesterday who died at 29. RIP Nick.



Sorry to hear about your friend, Amber.


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## garza (Jun 7, 2012)

Never having been a fan of science fiction, I've read very little of Bradbury. He was certainly a highly skilled craftsman, judging by the two or three stories of his I've read.


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## Skodt (Jun 7, 2012)

I only ever read one of his works. Yet his detail and imagination was fun and entertaining to follow. He will be missed in the writer world.


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## Kevin (Jun 7, 2012)

I especially love his depictions of pre- WWll Illinois in D_andelion wine_ and _Something wicked_....
1950s Venice Beach, California in _Death is a Lonely Business _is another masterpiece. Lion cages in the dilapidated canals, the pier before demolition...


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## Ol' Fartsy (Jun 8, 2012)

I thought he, when I heard this, had died 15-20 years ago. But that is still sad. We lost a brilliant mind.


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## bazz cargo (Jun 8, 2012)

I'm wearing my black arm band.
Thankfully I can pick up a book and visit him any-time.


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## Kyle R (Jun 9, 2012)

[video=youtube;E1hIsf13kjM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1hIsf13kjM[/video]


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## Sunny (Jun 10, 2012)

KyleColorado said:


> [video=youtube;E1hIsf13kjM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1hIsf13kjM[/video]



WOW! 

I am in love with Ray Bradbury. What an adorable sweet man. He just has it right. He has it all right. 

I love that video. I love that video! ;0)


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## Kyle R (Jun 10, 2012)

Isn't he great? I replay this whenever I get discouraged.


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## Sunny (Jun 10, 2012)

KyleColorado said:


> Isn't he great? I replay this whenever I get discouraged.



That's a _very _encouraging video! I loved it. Thank you for posting it. 

I can see why his writing is so wonderful. His passion just radiates from him. I suppose if he talks like that, it would come across in his writing. 

Awesome!


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## garza (Jun 10, 2012)

He looks like my maternal grandfather, especially at the very end, except for the glasses and the tie. My grandfather wore old-fashioned (they were old fashioned in 1950) steel-rimmed eyeglasses with thick lenses and he never appeared outside the house without a string bow tie of the sort popular in the 1880's. The voice is not the same, though the message is the same as what my grandfather taught. My grandfather's voice had the Ulster lilt. His words were most often delivered in a deep growl, rising upward to a trumpet call when he spoke about politics or religion. I inherited his voice, which I've used to some advantage at times on the radio and in bars, but I inherited my paternal grandfather's looks. After seeing this I'm going to read more of Bradbury. It may be my prejudice against science fiction has kept me from enjoying some good writing.


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## Writ (Jun 10, 2012)

garza said:


> He looks like my maternal grandfather, especially at the very end, except for the glasses and the tie. My grandfather wore old-fashioned (they were old fashioned in 1950) steel-rimmed eyeglasses with thick lenses and he never appeared outside the house without a string bow tie of the sort popular in the 1880's.



Your grandfather was Colonel Sanders?


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## Writ (Jun 10, 2012)

Lots of people that are successful or have money think life "is about having 'fun' and enjoying yourself." 

Ray Bradbury was an old fat man with money and popularity that's why he subscribed to that. He might subscribed or contemplated deeper depth to life and existence on this planet is he was a bald head little boy going through chemotherapy or one of the millions of children living in abject poverty throughout the developing world forced to work in menial labor to help their families exist day to day. 

Part of life is about suffering. Maybe part of it is about how much or how well you help others through the travails and sufferings of life. I don't know.

According to the U.S. Marine Corps suffering and struggle builds "character." Something they like to say every time you're forced to go without a meal or have to go through something else that you really feels sucks. 

As you mature in life it comes with responsibilities too. And my personal opinion is that as you age it becomes almost impossible not to compromise yourself in some way. A parent and spouse with responsibilities can't just think of themselves and what makes them happy. It might be that you have to be practical and take on assignments or jobs that you don't not really enjoy and put your pursuits that you love on back-burner. 

I've got a partner closing in on 40 living at my pad that doesn't pay on any of the bills. He's a good friend but he has a felony, no work, and idolizes "street life." I'm sure he would love making millions not working a regular job but hustling on the street like mobsters in the movie. But sometimes you need to put practical affairs ahead of your "loves" and fantasies.

That applies to novels, boxing, or modeling.


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## Kyle R (Jun 10, 2012)

Writ said:


> Lots of people that are successful or have money think life "is about having 'fun' and enjoying yourself."
> 
> Ray Bradbury was an old fat man with money and popularity that's why he subscribed to that. He might subscribed or contemplated deeper depth to life and existence on this planet is he was a bald head little boy going through chemotherapy or one of the millions of children living in abject poverty throughout the developing world forced to work in menial labor to help their families exist day to day.
> 
> Part of life is about suffering. Maybe part of it is about how much or how well you help others through the travails and sufferings of life. I don't know.



[video=youtube;Y9fyY8wLqgw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9fyY8wLqgw[/video]


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## Kevin (Jun 10, 2012)

@G- Much of _the martian chronicles_  is allegory, the Martians being an indigenous people, over-run by... It's a collection of shorts really, some set on Earth.


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## Kyle R (Jun 10, 2012)

That was a joke, by the way, Writ. 

In all seriousness, though, Bradbury was a fiction writer, not a political or human rights activist.

Though he did touch on poverty and suffering in some of his stories. One that comes to mind is _The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge

_(see next post)


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## Kyle R (Jun 10, 2012)

*The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge*
Ray Bradbury​

"A fool,' I said. "That's what I am.'

"Why?' asked my wife. "What for?'

I brooded by our third-floor hotel window. On the Dublin street below a man passed, his face to the lamplight. "Him,' I muttered. "Two days ago----'

Two days ago as I was walking along, someone had "hissed' me from the hotel alley. "Sir, it's important! Sir!'

I turned into the shadow. This little man in the direct tones said, "I've a job in Belfast if I just had a pound for the train fare!'

I hesitated.

"A most important job!' he went on swiftly. "Pays well! I'll--I'll mail you back the loan! Just give me your name and hotel----'

He knew me for a tourist. But it was too late; his promise to pay had moved me. The pound note crackled in my hand, being worked free from several others.

The man's eye skimmed like a shadowing hawk. "If I had two pounds, I could eat on the way----'

I uncrumpled two bills.

"And three pounds would bring the wife----'

I unleafed a third.

"Ah, hell!' cried the man. "Five, just five poor pounds, would find us a hotel in that brutal city and let me get to the job, for sure!'

What a dancing fighter he was, light on his toes, weaving, tapping with his hands, flicking with his eyes, smiling with his mouth, jabbing with his tongue.

"Lord thank you, bless you, sir!'

He ran, my five pounds with him. I was half in the hotel before I realized that, for all his vows, he had not recoreded my name. "Gah!' I cried then.

"Gah!' I cried now at the window. For there, passing below, was the very fellow who should have been in Belfast two nights ago.

"Oh, I know him,' said my wife. "He stopped me this noon. Wanted train fare to Galway.'

"Did you give it to him?'

"No,' said my wife simply.

Then the worst thing happened. The demon glanced up, saw us and darned if he didn't wave!

I had to stop myself from waving back. A sickly grin played on my lips. "It's got so I hate to leave the hotel,' I said.

"It's cold out, all right.'

"No,' I said. "Not the cold. Them.'

And we looked again from the window. There was the cobbled Dublin street with the night wind blowing in a fine soot along one way to Trinity College, another to St. Stephen's Green. Across by the sweet shop two men stood mummified in the shadows. Farther up in a doorway was a bundle of old newspapers that would stir like a pack of mice and wish you the time of evening if you walked by. Below, by the hotel entrance, stood a feverish hothouse rose of a woman with a bundle.

"Oh, the beggars,' said my wife.

"No, not just "oh, the beggars,'' I said. "But, oh, the people in the streets, who somehow became beggars.'

My wife peered at me. "You're not afraid of them?'

"Yes, no. Hell. It's that woman with the bundle who's worst. She's a force of nature, she is. Assaults you with her poverty. As for the others-- well, it's a big chess game for me now. We've been in Dublin--what?--eight weeks? Eight weeks I've sat up here with my typewriter, and studied their off hours and on. When they take a coffee break, I take one, run for the sweet shop, the bookstore, the Olympia Theatre. If I time it right, there's no handout, no my wanting to trot them into the barbershop or the kitchen.'

"Lord,' said my wife, "you sound driven.'

"I am. But most of all by that beggar on O'Connell Bridge!'

"Which one?'

"Which one, indeed! He's a wonder, a terror. I hate him, I love him. To see is to disbelieve him. Come on.'

On the way down in the elevator my wife said, "If you held your face right, the beggars wouldn't bother you.'

"My face,' I explained patiently, "is my face. It's from Apple Dumpling, Wisconsin, Sarsaparilla, Maine. KIND TO DOGS is writ on my brow for all to read. Let the street be empty-- then let me step out and there's a strikers' march of freeloaders leaping out of manholes for miles around.'

"If,' my wife went on, "you could just learn to look over, around or through those people, state them down.' She mused, "Shall I show you how to handle them?'

"All right, show me! We're here!'

We advanced through the Royal Hibernian Hotel lobby to squint out at the sooty night. "Good Lord, come and get me,' I murmured. "There they are, their heads up, their eyes on fire.'

"Meet me down by the bookstore in two minutes,' said my wife. "Watch.'

"Wait!' I cried.

But she was out the door and down the steps. I watched, nose pressed to the glass pane. The beggars leaned toward my wife. Their eyes glowed.

My wife looked calmly at them all for a long moment. The beggars hesitated, creaking, I was sure, in their shoes. Then their mouths collapsed. Their eyes snuffed out. Their heads sank down.

With a tat-tat like a small drum, my wife's shoes went briskly away, fading.

From below in the buttery I heard music and laughter. I'll run down, I thought, and slug me a quick one. Then, bravery resurgent----No, I thought, and I swung the door wide. The effect was much as if someone had struck a great Mongolian steel gong, once.

I thought I heard a tremendous insuck of breath. Then I heard hobnailed shoes flinting the cobbles in sparks. The man came running. I saw hands waving; mouths opened on smiles like old pianos.

Far down the street at the book shop my wife waited, her back turned. But that third eye in the back of her head must have caught the scene: Columbus greeted by Indians; Saint Francis amid his squirrel friends with a handful of crumbs.

I was not half down the steps when the woman charged up, thrusting the unwrapped bundle at me.

"Ah, see the poor child!' she wailed.

I stared at the baby. The baby stared back. God in heaven, did or did not the shrewd thing wink at me? I've gone mad, I thought; the babe's eyes are shut. She's filled it with beer to keep it warm and on display.

My hand, my coins, blurred among them.

"Praise be!'

"The child thanks you, sir!'

"Ah, sure. There's only a few of us left!'

I broke through them and beyond, running. My wife, without turning, saw my reflection in the book-shop window and nodded.

I stood getting my breath and brooded at my own image: the summer eyes, the ebullient and defenseless mouth. "All right, say it,' I signed. "It's the way I hold my face.'

"I love the way you hold your face.' She took my arm. "I wish I could do it too.'

I looked back as one of the beggars strolled off in the blowing dark with my shillings.

""There's only a few of us left.'' I said aloud. "What did he mean, saying that?'

""There's only a few of us left.'' My wife stared into the shadows. "Is that what he said?'

"It's something to think about. A few of what? Left where?' The street was empty now. It was starting to rain. "Well,' I said at last. "Let me show you the even bigger mystery, the man who provokes me to strange wild rages, then calms me to delight. Solve him and you solve all the beggars that ever were.'

"On O'Connell Bridge?' asked my wife.

"On O'Connell Bridge,' I said.

And we walked on down in the gently misting rain.

Halfway to the bridge, as we were examining some fine Irish crystal in a window, a woman with a shawl over her head plucked at my elbow.

"Destroyed!' the woman sobbed. "My poor sister. Cancer, the doctor said; her dead in a month! And me with mouths to feed! Ah, if you had just a penny!'

I felt my wife's arm tighten to mine. I looked at the woman, split as always, one half saying: A penny is all she asks! The other half doubting: Clever woman, she knows that by underasking you'll overpay! I hated myself for the battle of halves.

I gasped. "You're----'

"I'm what, sir?'

Why, I thought, you're the woman who was just by the hotel with the baby!

"I'm sick!' She drew back in shadow. "Sick with crying for the half-dead!'

You've stashed the baby somewhere, I thought, and put on a green instead of a gray shawl and run the long way around to head us off here----

My wife cut across my thoughts. "Beg pardon, but aren't you the same woman we just met at our hotel?'

The woman and I were both shocked at this rank insubordination. It wasn't done!

The woman's face crumpled. I peered close. And yes, it was a different face. I could not but admire her. She knew, sensed, had learned-- that by thrusting, yelling, all fiery-lipped arrogance one moment you are one character; and by sinking, giving way, crumpling the mouth and eyes in pitiful collapse, you are another. The same woman, yes; but the same face and role? Quite obviously no.

She gave me a last blow beneath the belt. "Cancer.'

I flinched. It was a brief tussle then, a kind of disengagement from one woman and an engagement with the other. The wife lost my arm, and the woman found my cash. As if she were on roller skates, she whisked around the corner and sobbed.

"Lord----' In awe I watched her go. "She's studied Stanislavsky. In one book he says that squinting one eye and twitching one lip to the side will disguise you. I wonder if she's nerve enough to be at the hotel later.'

"I wonder,' said my wife, "when my husband will stop admiring and start criticizing such acting as that?'

"But what if it were true? Everything she said? And she's lived with it so long, she can't cry any more, and so has to playact in order to survive? What if?'

"It can't be true,' said my wife slowly. "I just won't believe it. Now, here's where we turn for O'Connell Bridge, isn't it?'

"It is.'

That corner was probably empty in the falling rain for a long time after we were gone.

There stood the gray-stone bridge bearing the great O'Connell's name, and there the River Liffey rolling cold, gray waters under, and even from a block off I heard faint singing. My mind spun back to December.

"They have their self-respect,' I said, walking with my wife, "I'm glad this first man here strums a guitar, the next one a fiddle. And there now--in the very center of the bridge!'

"The man we're looking for?'

"That's him. Squeezing the concertina. It's all right to look. Or I think it is.'

"What do you mean, you think it is? He's blind, isn't he?'

These raw words shocked me, as if my wife had said somethink indecent. "That's the trouble,' I said at last. "I don't know.'

And we both in passing looked at the man standing there in the very middle of O'Connell Bridge.

He was a man of no great height, a bandy statue swiped from some country garden perhaps, and his clothes like the clothes of most in Ireland too often laundered by the weather, and his hair too often grayed by the smoking air, and his cheeks sooted with beard, and a nest or two of witless hair in each cupped ear, and the blushing cheeks of a man who has stood too long in the cold and drunk too much in the pub so as to stand too long in the cold again. Dark glasses covered his eyes and there was no telling what lay behind. I had begun to wonder, weeks back, if his sight prowled me along, damning my guilty speed, or if only his ears caught the passing of a harried conscience. There was that awful itch to seize in passing the glasses from his nose. But I feared the abyss I might find, into which my senses in one terrible roar might tumble. Best not to know if civet's orb or interstellar space gaped behind the smoked panes.

But even more, there was a special reason I could not let the man be.

In the rain and wind and snow for two solid months I had seen him standing with no cap or hat on his head. He was the only man in all Dublin I saw in the downpours and drizzles who stood by the hour alone with the drench mizzling his ears, threading his ash-red hair, plastering it over his skull, rivuleting his eyebrows and purling over his glasses. Down through the cracks of his cheeks, the lines about his mouth and off his chin the weather ran. His sharp chin shot the drizzle in a steady fauceting into the air, down his tweed scarf and locomotive-colored coat.

"Why doesn't he wear a hat?' I said suddenly.

"Why,' said my wife, "maybe he hasn't got one.'

"He must have one,' I said.

"Keep your voice down.'

"He's got to have one,' I said, more quietly.

"Maybe he can't afford one. Maybe he has bills to pay, someone sick.'

"But to stand out for weeks, months in the rain and not so much as flinch, ignoring the rain--it's beyond understanding.' I shook my head. "I can only think it's a trick. That must be it. Like the others, this is his way of getting sympathy, of making you cold and miserable as himself, so you'll give him more.'

"I bet you're sorry you said that already,' said my wife.

"I am. I am.' For even under my cap the rain was running off my nose. "Sweet God in heaven, what's the answer?'

"Why don't you ask him?'

"No.' I was even more afraid of that.

Then the last thing happened, the thing that went with his standing bareheaded in the cold rain. For a moment, while we had been talking at some distance, he had been silent. Now, he gave his concertina a great mash. From the folding, unfolding, snakelike box he squeezed a series of asthmatic notes, which were no preparation for what followed.

He opened his mouth. He sang. The sweet, clear, baritone voice that rang over O'Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a quaver, not a flaw anywhere in it. The man just opened his mouth. He did not sing so much as let his soul free.

"Oh,' said my wife, "how lovely.'

"Lovely.' I nodded.

We listened while he sang the full irony of "Dublin's Fair City' (where it rains 12 inches a month the winter through), followed by the white-wine clarity of "Kathleen Mavourneen, Macushlo,' and all the other tired lads, lasses, lakes, hills, past glories, present miseries--but all somehow revived and moving about, young and freshly painted in the light spring and suddenly not-winter rain.

"Why,' said my wife, "he could be on the stage.'

"Maybe he was once.'

"Oh, he's too good to be standing here.'

"I've thought that--often.'

My wife fumbled with her purse. I looked from her to the singing man, the rain falling on his bare head, streaming through his shellacked hair, trembling on his ear lobes. My wife had her purse open.

And then the strange perversity. Before my wife could move toward him, I took her elbow and led her down the other side of the bridge. She pulled back for a moment and gave me a look, then came along.

As we went away along the banks of the Liffey he started a new song, one we had heard often in Ireland. Glancing back I saw him, head proud, black glasses taking the pour, mouth open and the fine voice clear:

I'll be glad when you're dead in your grave, old man,
Be glad when you're dead in your grave, old man.
Be glad when you're dead,
Flowers over your head,
And then I'll marry the journeyman . ...

It is only later, looking back, that you see that while you were doing all the other things in your life, working on an article concerning one part of Ireland in your rain-battered hotel, taking your wife to dinner, wandering in the museums, you also had an eye beyond to the street and those who served themselves, who only stood to wait.

The beggars of Dublin--who bothers to wonder on them, look, see, know, understand? Yet the outer shell of the eye sees and the inner shell of the mind records, and you, caught between, ignore the rare service these two halves of a bright sense are up to.
So I did and did not concern myself with beggars. So I did run from them or walk to meet them, by turn. So I heard but did not hear, considered but did not consider: "There's only a few of us left!'

One day I was sure the man taking his daily shower on O'Connell Bridge while he sang was not blind. And the next, his head to me was a cup of darkness.

One afternoon I found myself lingering before a tweed shop near O'Connell Bridge and staring in at a stack of good, thick, burly caps. I did not need another cap, yet in I went to pay out money for a fine, warm, brown-colored cap I turned round and round in my hands, in a strange trance.

"Sir,' said the clerk. "That cap is a seven. I would guess your head, sir, at a seven and one half.'

"This will fit me. This will fit me.' I stuffed the cap in my pocket.

"Let me get you a sack, sir----'

"No!' Hot-cheeked, suddenly suspicious of what I was up to, I fled.

There was the bridge in the soft rain. All I need do now was walk over----

In the middle of the bridge, my singing man was not there. In his place stood an old man and woman cranking a great piano-box hurdy-gurdy that ratcheted and coughted, giving forth no melody but a grand and melancholy sort of iron indigestion.

I waited for the tune, if tune it was, to finish. I kneaded the new tweed cap in my sweaty fist while the hurdygurdy prickled, spanged and thumped.

"Be damned to ya!' the old man and woman, furious with their job, seemed to say, their eyes red-hot in the rain. "Pay us! Listen! But we'll give you no tune! Make up your own!' their mute lips said.

And standing there on the spot where the beggar always sang without his cap, I thought; Why don't they take one-fifth of the money they make each month and have the thing tuned! If I were cranking the box, I'd want a tune, at least for myself! . . . If you were cranking the box, I answered. But you're not. And it's obvious they hate the begging job--who'd blame them?--and want no part of giving back a familiar song as recompense.

How different from my capless friend. My friend?

I blinked with surprise, then stepped forward. "Beg pardon. The man who played the concertina----'

The woman stopped cranking and glared at me.

"The man with no cap in the rain----'

"Ah, him!' snapped the woman.

"He's not here today?'

"Do you see him!' cried the woman.

She started cranking the infernal device. I put a penny in the tin cup. She peered at me as if I'd spit in the cup. I put in another penny. She stopped.

"Do you know where he is?'

"Sick in bed. The damn cold! We heard him go off, coughing.'

"Do you know where he lives?'

"No!'

"Do you know his name?'

"Now who would know that?'

I stood there, feeling directionless, thinking of the man somewhere off in the town, alone. I looked at the new cap foolishly.

The two old people were watching me uneasily. I put a last shilling in the cup. "He'll be all right,' I said, not to them, but to someone--me, I hoped.

The woman heaved the crank. The bucketing machine let loose a fall of glass and junk in its hideous interior.

"The tune,' I said numbly. "What is it?'

"You're deaf!' snapped the woman. "It's the national anthem! Do you mind removing your cap?'

I showed her the new cap in my hand.

She glared up. "Your cap, man, your cap!'

"Oh!' Flushing, I seized the old cap from my head.

Now I had a cap in each hand. The woman cranked. The "music' played. The rain hit my brow, my eyelids, my mouth. On the far side of the bridge I stopped for the hard, the slow decision: Which cap to try on my drenched skull?

During the next week I passed the bridge often, but there was always just the old couple there with their pandemonium device, or no one there at all.

On the last day of our visit my wife started to pack the new tweed cap away in the suitcase.

"Thanks, No.' I took it from her. "Let's keep it out--on the mantel, please. There.'

That night the hotel manager brought a farewell bottle to our room. The talk was long and good, the hour grew late, there was a fire on the hearth, big and lively, and brandy in the glasses, and silence for a moment in the room perhaps because suddenly we found silence falling in great soft flakes past our windows.

The manager, glass in hand, watched the continual lace, then looked down at the midnight street and at last said, under his breath: "There's only a few of us left.'

I glanced at my wife, and she at me.

The manager caught us. "Do you know him, then? Has he said it to you?'

"Yes. But what does the phrase mean?'

The manager watched all those figures down there standing in the shadows and sipped his drink. "Once I thought he meant he fought in the Troubles, and there's just a few of the IRA left. But no. Or maybe he means that in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that also. So, maybe, perhaps, he means there aren't many "human beings' left who look, see what they look at and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running here, jumping there, there's no time to study one another.'

He half turned from the window. "So you know There's Only a Few of Us Left, do you?'

My wife and I nodded.

"Then do you know the woman with the baby?'

"Yes,' I said.

"And the one with the cancer?'

"Yes,' said my wife.

"And the man who needs train fare to Cork?'

"Belfast,' said I.

"Galway,' said my wife.

The manager smiled sadly and turned back to the window.

"What about the old couple with the piano that plays no tune?'

"Has it ever?' I asked.

"Not since I was a boy.' The manager's face was shadowed now. "Do you know the beggar on O'Connell Bridge?'

"Which one?' I said.

But I knew which one, for I was looking at the cap on the mantel.

"Did you see the paper today?' asked the manager.

"No.'

"There's just the item, bottom half of page five, Irish Times. It seems he just got tired. And he threw his concertina over into the River Liffey. And he jumped after it.'

He was back then yesterday! I thought. And I didn't pass by!

"The poor beggar.' The manager laughed with a hollow exhalation. "What a funny, horried way to die. That silly concertina--I hate them, don't you? Wheezing on its way down, like a sick cat, and the man falling after. I laughed and I'm ashamed of laughing. Well. They didn't find the body.'

"Oh, Lord!' I cried, getting up. "Oh, damn!'

The manager, surprised at my concern, watched me carefully now. "You couldn't help it.'

"I could! I never gave him a penny, not one, ever! Did you?'

"Come to think of it, no.'

"But you're worse than I am!' I protested. "I've seen you around town, shoveling out pennies hand over fist. Why, why not to him?'

"I guess I thought he was overdoing it.'

"Yes!' I was at the window now too and staring down through the falling snow. "I thought his bare head was a trick to make me feel sorry. After a while you think everything's a trick! I used to pass there winter nights with the rain thick and him there singing, and he made me feel so cold I hated his guts. I wonder how many other people felt cold and hated him because he did that to them? So, instead of getting money, he got nothing in his cup. I lumped him with the rest. But maybe he was one of the legitimate ones, the new poor just starting out this winter--not a beggar ever before; so you hock your clothes to feed a stomach and wind up a man in the rain without a hat.'

The snow was falling fast now, erasing the lamps and the statues in the shadows of the lamps below.

"How do you tell the difference between them?' I asked. "How can you judge which is honest, which isn't?'

"The fact is,' said the manager quietly, "you can't. There's no difference between them. Some have been at it longer than others and have gone shrewd, forgotten how it all started a long time ago. On a Saturday they had food. On a Sunday they didn't. On a Monday they asked for credit. On a Tuesday they borrowed their first match. Thursday a cigarette. And a few Fridays later they found themselves, God knows how, in front of a place called the Royal Hibernian Hotel. They couldn't tell you what happened or why. One thing's sure, though: they're hanging to the cliff by their fingernails. Poor fellow, someone must've stomped on that man's hands on O'Connell Bridge and he just gave up the ghost and went over.

"So what does it prove? You cannot stare them down or look away from them. You cannot run and hide from them. You can only give to them all. If you start drawing lines, someone gets hurt. I'm sorry now I didn't give that blind singer a shilling each time I passed. Well, well. Let us console ourselves and hope it wasn't money but something at home or in his past that did him in. There's no way to find out. The paper lists no name.'

Snow fell silently across our sight. Below, the dark shapes waited. It was hard to tell whether snow was making sheep of the wolves or sheep of the sheep and gently mantling their shoulders, their hats and shawls.

A moment later, going down in the elevator, I found the new tweed cap in my hand. Coatless, in my shirt sleeves, I stepped out into the night. I gave the cap to the first man who came. What money I had in my pockets was soon gone.

Then left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows.

What's it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy? _Do they even know I'm here_?

* * *​


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## garza (Jun 10, 2012)

Writ - The part of the Bradbury message that echoes my grandfather is the very first part. Do what you love, and love what you do, and don't let anyone tell you that you can't. I agree that the 'fat dumb and happy' part seems to be an indication of a life lived without knowing much of what goes on in the real world. Even the short story offered by Kyle shows a disconnect. I wonder if Bradbury knew the whole history of O'Connell Bridge, which I've heard from gran'fa more than once. Using it as a setting for such a story strikes me as inappropriate, but that's just me. Pay no mind. Physically Bradbury does look like my grandfather in great old age, which he had already reached when I was born. He died in 1950 when I was ten and he was 85, and 'tis the truth I'm telling you, that I do miss him to this day.


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## Kevin (Jun 11, 2012)

Perhaps he had more oportunity than some, or many, but at least he did not sit on his hands. Just going to work and slogging away, yes, we do that, but we are gifted with time here too. At some point he was younger and un-published. I think it's a positive message, and relevant for most of us.


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## Kyle R (Jun 11, 2012)

This is what it's come to? Calling Mr. Bradbury "fat, dumb" and ignorant?

*Shakes head sadly*


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## Sunny (Jun 11, 2012)

KyleColorado said:


> This is what it's come to? Calling Mr. Bradbury "fat, dumb" and ignorant?
> 
> *Shakes head sadly*


I'm saddened as well.


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## Terry D (Jun 11, 2012)

Writ said:


> Lots of people that are successful or have money think life "is about having 'fun' and enjoying yourself."
> 
> Ray Bradbury was an old fat man with money and popularity that's why he subscribed to that. He might subscribed or contemplated deeper depth to life and existence on this planet is he was a bald head little boy going through chemotherapy or one of the millions of children living in abject poverty throughout the developing world forced to work in menial labor to help their families exist day to day.
> 
> ...



Bradbury wasn't always a "fat old man with money and popularity", he came from a working class family and was jerked around from Illinois to Tucson Arizona, back to Illinois, and finally to Los Angles as his father looked for work.  Maybe he wasn't sickly, or impoverished, but his life was hardly one of wealth and privilege.  He made a decision early on to do what he loved to do, write.  It worked out well for him, why would he not recommend that other people do the same thing?   His message in the video is not that life is about having fun and enjoying yourself -- his message is that people should find what it is that they love to do and do it.  Some people love to farm, some love to paint houses, some love to write, is it wrong to encourage people to find what they love?

Most of us do end up compromising what we love for the sake of practicality and bending to the will of the 'real world', but there are those rare few who have the courage and faith in themselves to bend the 'real world' to their will.  Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a library typewriter rented to him by the half-hour.  He earned every bit of what he had and in return he gave the world a body of work which will last as long as words are there to be read.

If the choice comes down to sitting at a keyboard after putting in my nine hours at work and pounding out words with a dream of becoming like Ray Bradbury, or lying on the couch dreaming gangster dreams, I'll happily take the advice of that "fat old man" (a description which fits me to a 'T') any day.


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## Writ (Jun 11, 2012)

I'm not ignoring you Kyle or garza but I want to respond to Terry.



Terry D said:


> *Bradbury wasn't always a "fat old man with money and popularity", he came from a working class family and was jerked around from Illinois to Tucson Arizona, back to Illinois, and finally to Los Angles as his father looked for work.  Maybe he wasn't sickly, or impoverished, but his life was hardly one of wealth and privilege.  He made a decision early on to do what he loved to do, write.  It worked out well for him, why would he not recommend that other people do the same thing?   *His message in the video is not that life is about having fun and enjoying yourself -- his message is that people should find what it is that they love to do and do it.  Some people love to farm, some love to paint houses, some love to write, is it wrong to encourage people to find what they love?
> 
> Most of us do end up compromising what we love for the sake of practicality and bending to the will of the 'real world', but there are those rare few who have the courage and faith in themselves to bend the 'real world' to their will.  *Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a library typewriter rented to him by the half-hour.  He earned every bit of what he had and in return he gave the world a body of work which will last as long as words are there to be read.
> *
> If the choice comes down to sitting at a keyboard after putting in my nine hours at work and pounding out words with a dream of becoming like Ray Bradbury, or lying on the couch dreaming gangster dreams, I'll happily take the advice of that "fat old man" (a description which fits me to a 'T') any day.



I stand corrected then, Terry. At least about more than a few traits about the man.

And I don't mean to suggest life or making your way up in the world in a developing country is easy. Just by the expressions of anger or depression on the faces of more than one person passing you by you know this is not true. 

On the other hand, we that are born and raised in the developed world benefit from access to a lot more mechanisms of upward mobility than lots of other people on the planet. Even the poor in the United States today are more materially pampered than they were in the 1960's or the decades before then. I recall one educated Brazilian telling me online that the impoverishment in Alabama of the 1960's didn't look much different from the impoverishment you find in Brazil today. 

But even in the U.S. a child born with some tragic deformity, disability, or disease will likely be very limited in what they can do. Their "happiness" will have to come through the Buddhist view of becoming content with there is no way to escape suffering in this existence. 

I don't know... part of my frustrations historically has been due in large part to my expectation that *I should *be happy. Then I finally realized one day why should I be so happy? What makes me so special? Nothing. I'm lucky I have all my teeth and two eyes to see out of. The number of people suffering throughout human history is incalculable. In many ways I got off easy. I got off easy in 1971 by being born in the United States - in the North - by two parents that are documented citizens, and both would eventually obtain middle-class socio-economic status. My life would have been different - for good or bad - had I been born in Mexico or Africa or Southeast Asia in 1971. 

I've never suffered through abject poverty and only know of it through reading about it. And what I've read about it informs me that their are many millions of people in developing nations born into situations where toil and surviving day to day are their only options. Aside from giving up and dying. 

I grew up with Santa Claus and ate breakfast every morning and education was mandatory. I grew up in a world where children *were suppose to be happy and play* or at minimum receive formal education through high school. This is not the same reality for millions if not billions of children on the planet. I know you've been around, so, I know you've seen all the small, dirty, children in tourist sections of Mexico holding their hands out to you and other gringos begging us for change. The odds for most these kids is that they won't get past grade school and they'll take what jobs they can get. Some of them will die or be robbed, raped, or murdered trying to illegally cross into the United States so they can cut some suburban person's lawn or mop some floor in a building. 

I might have been jumping the gun with my comments and immediate opinions about Ray Bradbury. I really no nothing of the man. And perhaps I filtered his words through a pre-bias I already have. I hear so often in the U.S. about "How to be happy," and that "Life is about being happy." Then there was that book and CD's that came out... what was it "The Secret"? About positive attitude bringing you whatever you want in life. It being a law of the universe. You want a brand new luxury car? Just keep saying you'll get and truly believe it and it will appear one day.

A lot of this strikes me as the privilege of citizens of the developed world. I mean... we have our basic needs met, so, we look for other things that supposedly form "the purpose" of our lives. And you also have a lot of frustrated or even depressed Americans - some of them more materially wealthy than myself - that are deeply depressed due in part because they think (and are told constantly in the media and by other Americans) they are supposed to be walking around happy all the damned time. No, sometimes life just sucks. Good news is that everyday does not have to suck. Hopefully not.


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## Kyle R (Jun 11, 2012)

Writ said:
			
		

> I really no nothing of the man.



That might explain it. I really can't understand why anyone would insult Ray. He was a kind soul who lived to write, that was his passion, and he wanted others to find their passion in the world.

"Oh, Ray Bradbury, you bastard!" *shakes fist*

I recommend reading some of his short stories. Many of them are metaphors for something else, and have a moral lesson or theme. Often his characters start with a misconception about life in the world and come to a realization at the end about the value of wonder and hope. Some others go the opposite route and show characters destroying themselves with greed, jealousy, anger.

Those who don't know his work too well think he's just a science fiction writer who wrote about mars and aliens and spaceships, but Ray himself considered himself a fantasy writer who wrote about life. Science and space and mars just happened to be part of the wonder of life that he wrote about.

In some of his more sci-fi'ish stories, like those in The Martian Chronicles, he uses the sci-fi components as allegory to create commentary on the real world.

Here's one of his stories that really stuck with me. I think it shows that he wasn't just some "fat dumb" ignoramus. He was writing about meaningful things while other lesser writers in his genre were simply making noise.

*June 2001: AND THE MOON BE STILL AS BRIGHT
*Ray Bradbury​
It was so cold when they first came from the rocket into the night that Spender began to gather the dry Martian wood and build a small fire. He didn't say anything about a celebration; he merely gathered the wood, set fire to it, and watched it burn.

In the flare that lighted the thin air of this dried-up sea of Mars he looked over his shoulder and saw the rocket that had brought them all, Captain Wilder and Cheroke and Hathaway and Sam Parkhill and himself, across a silent black space of stars to land upon a dead, dreaming world.

Jeff Spender waited for the noise. He watched the other men and waited for them to jump around and shout. It would happen as soon as the numbness of being the "first" men to Mars wore off. None of them said anything, but many of them were hoping, perhaps, that the other expeditions had failed and that this, the Fourth, would be _the_ one. They meant nothing evil by it. But they stood thinking it, nevertheless, thinking of the honor and fame, while their lungs became accustomed to the thinness of the atmosphere, which almost made you drunk if you moved too quickly.

Gibbs walked over to the freshly ignited fire and said, "Why don't we use the ship's chemical fire instead of that wood?"

"Never mind," said Spender, not looking up. It wouldn't be right, the first night on Mars, to make a loud noise, to introduce a strange, silly bright thing like a stove. It would be a kind of imported blasphemy. There'd be time for that later; time to throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the _New York Times _to blow and caper and rustle across the lone gray Martian sea bottoms; time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicate ruins of the old Martian valley towns. Plenty of time for that. And he gave a small inward shiver at the thought.

He fed the fire by hand, and it was like an offering to a dead giant, They had landed on an immense tomb. Here a civilization had died. It was only simple courtesy that the first night be spent quietly.

"This isn't my idea of a celebration." Gibbs turned to Captain Wilder. "Sir, I thought we might break out rations of gin and meat and whoop it up a bit."

Captain Wilder looked off toward a dead city a mile away. "We're all tired," he said remotely, as if his whole attention was on the city and his men forgotten. "Tomorrow night, perhaps. Tonight we should be glad we got across all that space without getting a meteor in our bulkhead or having one man of us die."

The men shifted around. There were twenty of them, holding to each other's shoulders or adjusting their belts. Spender watched them. They were not satisfied. They had risked their lives to do a big thing. Now they wanted to be shouting drunk, firing off guns to show how wonderful they were to have kicked a hole in space and ridden a rocket all the way to Mars.

But nobody was yelling.

The captain gave a quiet order. One of the men ran into the ship and brought forth food tins which were opened and dished out without much noise. The men were beginning to talk now. The captain sat down and recounted the trip to them.

They already knew it all, but it was good to hear about it, as something over and done and safely put away. They would not
talk about the return trip. Someone brought that up, but they told him to keep quiet. The spoons moved in the double moonlight; the food tasted good and the wine was even better.

There was a touch of fire across the sky, and an instant later the auxiliary rocket landed beyond the camp. Spender watched as the small port opened and Hathaway, the physician-geologist--they were all men of twofold ability, to conserve space on the trip--stepped out. He walked slowly over to the captain.

"Well?" said Captain Wilder.

Hathaway gazed out at the distant cities twinkling in the starlight. After swallowing and focusing his eyes he said, "That city there, Captain, is dead and has been dead a good many thousand years. That applies to those three cities in the hills also. But that fifth city, two hundred miles over, sir--"

"What about it?"

"People were living in it last week, sir."

Spender got to his feet.

"Martians," said Hathaway.

"Where are they now?"

"Dead," said Hathaway. "I went into a house on one street. I thought that it, like the other towns and houses, had been dead for centuries. My God, there were bodies there. It was like walking in a pile of autumn leaves. Like sticks and pieces of burnt newspaper, that's all. And _fresh_. They'd been dead ten days at the outside."

"Did you check other towns? Did you see _anything_ alive?"

"Nothing whatever. So I went out to check the other towns. Four out of five have been empty for thousands of years. What happened to the original inhabitants I haven't the faintest idea. But the fifth city always contained the same thing. Bodies. Thousands of bodies."

"What did they die of?" Spender moved forward.

"You won't believe it."

"What killed them?"

Hathaway said simply, "Chicken pox."

"My God, no!"

"Yes. I made tests. Chicken pox. It did things to the Martians it never did to Earth Men. Their metabolism reacted differently, I suppose. Burnt them black and dried them out to brittle flakes. But it's chicken pox, nevertheless. So York and Captain Williams and Captain Black must have got through to Mars, all three expeditions. God knows what happened to them. But we at least know what _they_ unintentionally did to the Martians."

"You saw no other life?"

"Chances are a few of the Martians, if they were smart, escaped to the mountains. But there aren't enough, I'll lay you money, to be a native problem. This planet is through."

Spender turned and went to sit at the fire, looking into it. Chicken pox, God, chicken pox, think of it! A race builds itself for a million years, refines itself, erects cities like those out there, does everything it can to give itself respect and beauty, and then it dies. Part of it dies slowly, in its own time, before our age, with dignity. But the rest! Does the rest of Mars die of a disease with a fine name or a terrifying name or a majestic name? No, in the name of all that's holy, it has to be chicken pox, a child's disease, a disease that doesn't even kill _children_ on Earth! It's not right and it's not fair. It's like saying the Greeks died of mumps, or the proud Romans died on their beautiful hills of athlete's foot! If only we'd given the Martians time to arrange their death robes, lie down, look fit, and think up some _other _excuse for dying. It can't be a dirty, silly thing like chicken pox. It doesn't fit the architecture; it doesn't fit this entire world!

"All right, Hathaway, get yourself some food."

"Thank you, Captain."

And as quickly as that it was forgotten. The men talked among themselves.

Spender did not take his eyes off them. He left his food on his plate under his hands. He felt the land getting colder.

The stars drew closer, very clear.

When anyone talked too loudly the captain would reply in a low voice that made them talk quietly from imitation.

The air smelled clean and new. Spender sat for a long time just enjoying the way it was made. It had a lot of things in it he couldn't identify: flowers, chemistries, dusts, winds. 

"Then there was that time in New York when I got that blonde, what's her name?--Ginnie!" cried Biggs. "_That_ was it!"

Spender tightened in. His hand began to quiver. His eyes moved behind the thin, sparse lids.

"And Ginnie said to me--" cried Biggs.

The men roared.

"So I smacked her!" shouted Biggs with a bottle in his hand.

Spender set down his plate. He listened to the wind over his ears, cool and whispering. He looked at the cool ice of the white Martian buildings over there on the empty sea lands. 

"What a woman, what a woman!" Biggs emptied his bottle in his wide mouth. "Of all the women I ever knew!"

The smell of Biggs's sweating body was on the air. Spender let the fire die. 

"Hey, kick her up there, Spender!" said Biggs, glancing at him for a moment, then back to his bottle. "Well, one night Ginnie and me--"

A man named Schoenke got out his accordion and did a kicking dance, the dust springing up around him.

"Ahoo--I'm alive!" he shouted.

"Yay!" roared the men. They threw down their empty plates. Three of them lined up and kicked like chorus maidens, joking
loudly. The others, clapping hands, yelled for something to happen. Cheroke pulled off his shirt and showed his naked chest, sweating as he whirled about. The moonlight shone on his crewcut hair and his young, clean-shaven cheeks.

In the sea bottom the wind stirred along faint vapors, and from the mountains great stone visages looked upon the silvery
rocket and the small fire. The noise got louder, more men jumped up, someone sucked on a mouth organ, someone else blew on a tissue-papered comb.

Twenty more bottles were opened and drunk. Biggs staggered about, wagging his arms to direct the dancing men.

"Come on, sir!" cried Cheroke to the captain, wailing a song.

The captain had to join the dance. He didn't want to. His face was solemn. Spender watched, thinking: You poor man, what
a night this is! They don't know what they're doing. They should have had an orientation program before they came to Mars
to tell them how to look and how to walk around and be good for a few days.

"That does it." The captain begged off and sat down, saying he was exhausted. Spender looked at the captain's chest. It wasn't moving up and down very fast. His face wasn't sweaty, either.

Accordion, harmonica, wine, shout, dance, wail, roundabout, dash of pan, laughter.

Biggs weaved to the rim of the Martian canal. He carried six empty bottles and dropped them one by one into the deep
blue canal waters. They made empty, hollow, drowning sounds as they sank.

"I christen thee, I christen thee, I christen thee--" said Biggs thickly. "I christen thee Biggs, Biggs, Biggs Canal--"

Spender was on his feet, over the fire, and alongside Biggs before anyone moved. 

He hit Biggs once in the teeth and once in the ear. 

Biggs toppled and fell down into the canal water. After the splash Spender waited silently for Biggs to climb back up onto the stone bank. By that time the men were holding Spender.

"Hey, what's eating you, Spender? Hey?" they asked.

Biggs climbed up and stood dripping. He saw the men holding Spender. "Well," he said, and started forward.

"That's enough," snapped Captain Wilder. The men broke away from Spender. Biggs stopped and glanced at the captain.

"All right, Biggs, get some dry clothes. You men, carry on your party! Spender, come with me!"

The men took up the party. Wilder moved off some distance and confronted Spender. "Suppose you explain what just
happened," he said.

Spender looked at the canal. "I don't know, I was ashamed. Of Biggs and us and the noise. Christ, what a spectacle."

"It's been a long trip. They've got to have their fling."

"Where's their respect, sir? Where's their sense of the right thing?"

"You're tired, and you've a different way of seeing things, Spender. That's a fifty-dollar fine for you."

"Yes, sir. It was just the idea of Them watching us make fools of ourselves."

"Them?"

"The Martians, whether they're dead or not."

"Most certainly dead," said the captain. "Do you think They know we're here?"

"Doesn't an old thing always know when a new thing comes?"

"I suppose so. You sound as if you believe in spirits."

"I believe in the things that were done, and there are evidences of many things done on Mars. There are streets and houses, and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and docks and places for stabling, if not horses, well, then some domestic animal, perhaps with twelve legs, who knows? Everywhere I look I see things that were _used_. They were touched and handled for centuries.

"Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I'll say yes. They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves."

"We won't ruin Mars," said the captain. "It's too big and too good."

"You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn't set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose. And Egypt is a small part of Earth. But here, this whole thing is ancient and different, and we have to set down somewhere and start fouling it up. We'll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and the mountain King George Mountain and the sea the Dupont sea, and there'll be Roosevelt and Lincoln and Coolidge cities and it won't ever be right, when there are the _proper _names for these places."

"That'll be your job, as archaeologists, to find out the old names, and we'll use them."

"A few men like us against all the commercial interests."

Spender looked at the iron mountains. "_They_ know we're here tonight, to spit in their wine, and I imagine they hate us."

The captain shook his head. "There's no hatred here." He listened to the wind. "From the look of their cities they were a graceful, beautiful, and philosophical people. They accepted what came to them. They acceded to racial death, that much we know, and without a last-moment war of frustration to tumble down their cities. Every town we've seen so far has been flawlessly intact. They probably don't mind us being here any more than they'd mind children playing on the lawn, knowing and understanding children for what they are. And, anyway, perhaps all this will change us for the better. 

"Did you notice the peculiar quiet of the men, Spender, until Biggs forced them to get happy? They looked pretty humble
and frightened. Looking at all this, we know we're not so hot; we're kids in rompers, shouting with our play rockets and atoms, loud and alive. But one day Earth will be as Mars is today. This will sober us. It's an object lesson in civilizations. We'll learn from Mars. Now suck in your chin. Let's go back and play happy. That fifty-dollar fine still goes."


The party was not going too well. The wind kept coming in off the dead sea. It moved around the men and it moved around the captain and Jeff Spender as they returned to the group. The wind pulled at the dust and the shining rocket and pulled at the accordion, and the dust got into the vamped harmonica. The dust got in their eyes and the wind made a high singing sound in the air. 
As suddenly as it had come the wind died. But the party had died too.

The men stood upright against the dark cold sky. "Come on, gents, come on!" Biggs bounded from the ship in a fresh uniform, not looking at Spender even once. His voice was like someone in an empty auditorium. It was alone. "Come on!"

Nobody moved.

"Come on, Whitie, your harmonica!"

Whitie blew a chord. It sounded funny and wrong. Whitie knocked the moisture from his harmonica and put it away.

"What kinda party _is_ this?" Biggs wanted to know.

Someone hugged the accordion. It gave a sound like a dying animal. That was all.

"Okay, me and my bottle will go have our own party."

Biggs squatted against the rocket, drinking from a flask.

Spender watched him. Spender did not move for a long time.

Then his fingers crawled up along his trembling leg to his holstered pistol, very quietly, and stroked and tapped the 
leather sheath.

"All those who want to can come into the city with me," announced the captain. "We'll post a guard here at the rocket and go armed, just in case." 

The men counted off. Fourteen of them wanted to go, including Biggs, who laughingly counted himself in, waving his bottle. Six others stayed behind.

"Here we go!" Biggs shouted.

The party moved out into the moonlight, silently. They made their way to the outer rim of the dreaming dead city in the light of the racing twin moons. Their shadows, under them, were double shadows. They did not breathe, or seemed not to, perhaps, for several minutes. They were waiting for something to stir in the dead city, some gray form to rise, some ancient, ancestral shape to come galloping across the vacant sea bottom on an ancient, armored steel of impossible lineage, of unbelievable derivation.

Spender filled the streets with his eyes and his mind.

People moved like blue vapor lights on the cobbled avenues, and there were faint murmurs of sound, and odd animals scurrying across the gray-red sands. Each window was given a person who leaned from it and waved slowly, as if under a timeless water, at some moving form in the fathoms of space below the moon-silvered towers. Music was played on some inner ear, and Spender imagined the shape of such instruments to evoke such music. The land was haunted.

"Hey!" shouted Biggs, standing tall, his hands around his open mouth. "Hey, you people in the city there, you!"

"Biggs!" said the captain.

Biggs quieted.

They walked forward on a tiled avenue. They were all whispering now, for it was like entering a vast open library or a mausoleum in which the wind lived and over which the stars shone. The captain spoke quietly. He wondered where the people had gone, and what they had been, and who their kings were, and how they had died. And he wondered, quietly aloud, how they had built this city to last the ages through, and had they ever come to Earth? Were they ancestors of Earth Men ten thousand years removed? And had they loved and hated similar loves and hates, and done similar silly things when silly things were done?

Nobody moved. The moons held and froze them; the wind beat slowly around them.

"Lord Byron," said Jeff Spender.

"Lord who?" The captain turned and regarded him.

"Lord Byron, a nineteenth-century poet. He wrote a poem a long time ago that fits this city and how the Martians must feel, if there's anything left of them to feel. It might have been written by the last Martian poet."

The men stood motionless, their shadows under them.

The captain said, "How does the poem go, Spender?"

Spender shifted, put out his hand to remember, squinted silently a moment; then, remembering, his slow quiet voice repeated the words and the men listened to everything he said: 

_"So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright."
_
The city was gray and high and motionless. The men's faces were turned in the light.

_"For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself must rest.

"Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon."
_
Without a word the Earth Men stood in the center of the city. It was a clear night. There was not a sound except the wind. At their feet lay a tile court worked into the shapes of ancient animals and peoples. They looked down upon it. Biggs made a sick noise in his throat. His eyes were dull. His hands went to his mouth; he choked, shut his eyes, bent, and a thick rush of fluid filled his mouth, spilled out, fell to splash on the tiles, covering the designs. Biggs did this twice, A sharp winy stench filled the cool air.

No one moved to help Biggs. He went on being sick.

Spender stared for a moment, then turned and walked off into the avenues of the city, alone in the moonlight. Never once did he pause to look back at the gathered men there. 

They turned in at four in the morning. They lay upon blankets and shut their eyes and breathed the quiet air.

Captain Wilder sat feeding little sticks into the fire.

McClure opened his eyes two hours later. "Aren't you sleeping, sir?"

"I'm waiting for Spender." The captain smiled faintly.

McClure thought it over. "You know, sir, I don't think he'll ever come back. I don't know how I know, but that's the way I feel about him, sir; he'll never come back." McClure rolled over into sleep. 

The fire crackled and died.

Spender did not return in the following week. The captain sent searching parties, but they came back saying they didn't know where Spender could have gone. He would be back when he got good and ready. He was a sorehead, they said. To the devil with him!

The captain said nothing but wrote it down in his log. . .


It was a morning that might have been a Monday or a Tuesday or any day on Mars. Biggs was on the canal rim; his feet hung down into the cool water, soaking, while he took the sun on his face.

A man walked along the bank of the canal. The man threw a shadow down upon Biggs. Biggs glanced up.

"Well, I'll be damned!" said Biggs.

"I'm the last Martian," said the man, taking out a gun.

"What did you say?" asked Biggs.

"I'm going to kill you."

"Cut it. What kind of joke's that, Spender?"

"Stand up and take it in the stomach."

"For Christ's sake, put that gun away."

Spender pulled the trigger only once. Biggs sat on the edge of the canal for a moment before he leaned forward and fell into the water. The gun had made only a whispering hum.

The body drifted with slow unconcern under the slow canal tides. It made a hollow bubbling sound that ceased after a moment.

Spender shoved his gun into its holster and walked soundlessly away. The sun was shining down upon Mars. He felt it burn his hands and slide over the sides of his tight face. He did not run; he walked as if nothing were new except the daylight. He walked down to the rocket, and some of the men were eating a freshly cooked breakfast under a shelter built by Cookie.

"Here comes The Lonely One," someone said.

"Hello, Spender! Long time no see!"

The four men at the table regarded the silent man who stood looking back at them.

"You and them goddamn ruins," laughed Cookie, stirring a black substance in a crock. "You're like a dog in a bone yard."

"Maybe," said Spender, "I've been finding out things. What would you say if I said I'd found a Martian prowling around?"

The four men laid down their forks.

"Did you? Where?"

"Never mind. Let me ask you a question. How would you feel if you were a Martian and people came to your land and started
tearing it up?"

"I know exactly how I'd feel," said Cheroke. "I've got some Cherokee blood in me. My grandfather told me lots of things about Oklahoma Territory. If there's a Martian around, I'm all for him."

"What about you other men?" asked Spender carefully.

Nobody answered; their silence was talk enough. Catch as catch can, finder's keepers, if the other fellow turns his cheek slap it hard, etc. . . .

"Well," said Spender, "I've found a Martian."

The men squinted at him.

"Up in a dead town. I didn't think I'd find him. I didn't intend looking him up. I don't know what he was doing there. I've been living in a little valley town for about a week, learning how to read the ancient books and looking at their old art forms. And one day I saw this Martian. He stood there for a moment and then he was gone. He didn't come back for another day. I sat around, learning how to read the old writing, and the Martian came back, each time a little nearer, until on the day I learned how to decipher the Martian language--it's amazingly simple and there are picturegraphs to help you--the Martian appeared before me and said, 'Give me your boots.' And I gave him my boots and he said, 'Give me your uniform and all the rest of your apparel.' And I gave him all of that, and then he said, 'Give me your gun,' and I gave him my gun. Then he said, 'Now come along and watch what happens.' And the Martian
walked down into camp and he's here now."

"I don't see any Martian," said Cheroke.

"I'm sorry."

Spender took out his gun. It hummed softly. The first bullet got the man on the left; the second and third bullets took the men on the right and the center of the table. Cookie turned in horror from the fire to receive the fourth bullet. He fell back into the fire and lay there while his clothes caught fire.

The rocket lay in the sun. Three men sat at breakfast, their hands on the table, not moving, their food getting cold in front of them. Cheroke, untouched, sat alone, staring in numb disbelief at Spender.

"You can come with me," said Spender.

Cheroke said nothing.

"You can be with me on this." Spender waited.

Finally Cheroke was able to speak. "You killed them," he said, daring to look at the men around him.

"They deserved it."

"You're crazy!"

"Maybe I am. But you can come with me."

"Come with you, for what?" cried Cheroke, the color gone from his face, his eyes watering. "Go on, get out!"

Spender's face hardened. "Of all of them, I thought you would understand."

"Get out!" Cheroke reached for his gun.

Spender fired one last time. Cheroke stopped moving.

Now Spender swayed. He put his hand to his sweating face. He glanced at the rocket and suddenly began to shake all over.
He almost fell, the physical reaction was so overwhelming. His face held an expression of one awakening from hypnosis, from
a dream. He sat down for a moment and told the shaking to go away. 

"Stop it, stop it!" he commanded of his body. Every fiber of him was quivering and shaking. "Stop it!" He crushed his
body with his mind until all the shaking was squeezed out of it. His hands lay calmly now upon his silent knees. 

He arose and strapped a portable storage locker on his back with quiet efficiency. His hand began to tremble again, just for a breath of an instant, but he said, "No!" very firmly, and the trembling passed. Then, walking stiffly, he moved out between the hot red hills of the land, alone. 

The sun burned farther up the sky. An hour later the captain climbed down out of the rocket to get some ham and eggs. He was just saying hello to the four men sitting there when he stopped and noticed a faint smell of gun fumes on the air. He saw the cook lying on the ground, with the campfire under him. The four men sat before food that was now cold.

A moment later Parkhill and two others climbed down.

The captain stood in their way, fascinated by the silent men and the way they sat at their breakfast.

"Call the men, all of them," said the captain.

Parkhill hurried off down the canal rim.

The captain touched Cheroke. Cheroke twisted quietly and fell from his chair. Sunlight burned in his bristled short hair and on his high cheekbones.

The men came in.

"Who's missing?"

"It's still Spender, sir. We found Biggs floating in the canal."

"Spender!"

The captain saw the hills rising in the daylight, The sun showed his teeth in a grimace. "Damn him," he said tiredly. "Why didn't he come and talk to me?"

"He should've talked to _me_," cried Parkhill, eyes blazing. "I'd have shot his bloody brains out, that's what I'd have done, by God!"

Captain Wilder nodded at two of his men. "Get shovels," he said.

It was hot digging the graves. A warm wind came from over the vacant sea and blew the dust into their faces as the captain turned the Bible pages. When the captain closed the book someone began shoveling slow streams of sand down upon the wrapped figures. They walked back to the rocket, clicked the mechanisms of their rifles, put thick grenade packets on their backs, and checked the free play of pistols in their holsters. They were each assigned part of the hills. The captain directed them without raising his voice or moving his hands where they hung at his sides.

"Let's go," he said.


Spender saw the thin dust rising in several places in the valley and he knew the pursuit was organized and ready. He put down the thin silver book that he had been reading as he sat easily on a flat boulder. The book's pages were tissue-thin, pure silver, hand-painted in black and gold. It was a book of philosophy at least ten thousand years old he had found in one of the villas of a Martian valley town. He was reluctant to lay it aside.

For a time he had thought, What's the use? I'll sit here reading until they come along and shoot me.

The first reaction to his killing the six men this morning had caused a period of stunned blankness, then sickness, and now, a strange peace. But the peace was passing, too, for he saw the dust billowing from the trails of the hunting men, and he experienced the return of resentment. 

He took a drink of cool water from his hip canteen. Then he stood up, stretched, yawned, and listened to the peaceful wonder of the valley around him. How very fine if he and a few others he knew on Earth could be here, live out their lives here, without a sound or a worry.

He carried the book with him in one hand, the pistol ready in his other. There was a little swift-running stream filled with white pebbles and rocks where he undressed and waded in for a brief washing. He took all the time he wanted before dressing and picking up his gun again.


The firing began about three in the afternoon. By then Spender was high in the hills. They followed him through three small Martian hill towns. Above the towns, scattered like pebbles, were single villas where ancient families had found a brook, a green spot, and laid out a tile pool, a library, and a court with a pulsing fountain. Spender took half an hour, swimming in one of the pools which was filled with the seasonal rain, waiting for the pursuers to catch up with him.

Shots rang out as he was leaving the little villa. Tile chipped up some twenty feet behind him, exploded. He broke into a trot, moved behind a series of small bluffs, turned, and with his first shot dropped one of the men dead in his tracks.

They would form a net, a circle; Spender knew that. They would go around and close in and they would get him. It was a strange thing that the grenades were not used. Captain Wilder could easily order the grenades tossed.

But I'm much too nice to be blown to bits, though Spender. That's what the captain thinks. He wants me with only one hole in me. Isn't that odd? He wants my death to be clean. Nothing messy. Why? Because he understands me. And because he understands, he's willing to risk good men to give me a clean shot in the head. Isn't that it?

Nine, ten shots broke out in a rattle. Rocks around him jumped up. Spender fired steadily, sometimes while glancing at the silver book he carried in his hand.

The captain ran in the hot sunlight with a rifle in his hands. Spender followed him in his pistol sights but did not fire. Instead he shifted and blew the top off a rock where Whitie lay, and heard an angry shout.

Suddenly the captain stood up. He had a white handkerchief in his hands. He said something to his men and came walking up the mountain after putting aside his rifle. Spender lay there, then got to his feet, his pistol ready.

The captain came up and sat down on a warm boulder, not looking at Spender for a moment.

The captain reached into his blouse pocket. Spender's fingers tightened on the pistol.

The captain said, "Cigarette?"

"Thanks." Spender took one.

"Light?"

"Got my own."

They took one or two puffs in silence.

"Warm," said the captain.

"It is."

"You comfortable up here?"

"Quite."

"How long do you think you can hold out?"

"About twelve men's worth."

"Why didn't you kill all of us this morning when you had the chance? You could have, you know."

"I know. I got sick. When you want to do a thing badly enough you lie to yourself. You say the other people are all wrong. Well, soon after I started killing people I realized they were just fools and I shouldn't be killing them. But it was too late. I couldn't go on with it then, so I came up here where I could lie to myself some more and get angry, to build it all up again."

"Is it built up?"

"Not very high. Enough."

The captain considered his cigarette. "Why did you do it?"

Spender quietly laid his pistol at his feet. "Because I've seen that what these Martians had was just as good as anything we'll ever hope to have. They stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago. I've walked in their cities and I know these people and I'd be glad to call them my ancestors." 

"They have a beautiful city there." The captain nodded at one of several places.

"It's not that alone. Yes, their cities are good. They knew how to blend art into their living. It's always been a thing apart for Americans. Art was something you kept in the crazy son's room upstairs. Art was something you took in Sunday doses, mixed with religion, perhaps. Well, these Martians have art and religion and everything."

"You think they knew what it was all about, do you?"

"For my money."

"And for that reason you started shooting people."

"When I was a kid my folks took me to visit Mexico City. I'll always remember the way my father acted--loud and big. And my mother didn't like the people because they were dark and didn't wash enough. And my sister wouldn't talk to most of them. I was the only one really liked it. And I can see my mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here.

"Anything that's strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense. The thought of that! Oh God, the thought of that! And then--the war. You heard the congressional speeches before we left. If things work out they hope to establish three atomic research and atom bomb depots on Mars. That means Mars is finished; all this wonderful stuff gone. How would you feel if a Martian vomited stale liquor on the White House floor?"

The captain said nothing but listened.

Spender continued: "And then the other power interests coming up. The mineral men and the travel men. Do you remember what happened to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? A whole civilization destroyed by greedy, righteous bigots. History will never forgive Cortez."

"You haven't acted ethically yourself today," observed the captain.

"What could I do? Argue with you? It's simply me against the whole crooked grinding greedy setup on Earth. They'll be flopping their filthy atoms bombs up here, fighting for bases to have wars. Isn't it enough they've ruined one planet, without ruining another; do they have to foul someone else's manger? The simple-minded windbags. When I got up here I felt I was not only free of their so-called culture, I felt I was free of their ethics and their customs. I'm out of their frame of reference, I thought. All I have to do is kill you all off and live my own life."

"But it didn't work out," said the captain.

"No. After the fifth killing at breakfast, I discovered I wasn't all new, all Martian, after all. I couldn't throw away everything I had learned on Earth so easily. But now I'm feeling steady again. I'll kill you all off. That'll delay the next trip in a rocket for a good five years. There's no other rocket in existence today, save this one. The people on Earth will wait a year, two years, and when they hear nothing from us, they'll be very afraid to build a new rocket. They'll take twice as long and make a hundred extra experimental models to insure themselves against another failure."

"You're correct."

"A good report from you, on the other hand, if you returned, would hasten the whole invasion of Mars. If I'm lucky I'll live to be sixty years old. Every expedition that lands on Mars will be met by me. There won't be more than one ship at a time coming up, one every year or so, and never more than twenty men in the crew. After I've made friends with them and explained that our rocket exploded one day--I intend to blow it up after I finish my job this week--I'll kill them off, every one of them. Mars will be untouched for the next half entury. After a while, perhaps the Earth people will give up trying. Remember how they grew leery of the idea of building Zeppelins that were always going down in flames?"

"You've got it all planned," admitted the captain.

"I have."

"Yet you're outnumbered. In an hour we'll have you surrounded. In an hour you'll be dead."

"I've found some underground passages and a place to live you'll never find. I'll withdraw there to live for a few weeks. Until you're off guard. I'll come out then to pick you off, one by one."

The captain nodded. "Tell me about your civilization here," he said, waving his hand at the mountain towns. 

"They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did, We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. 

"We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people."

"And these Martians are a _found_ people?" inquired the captain.

"Yes. They knew how to combine science and religion so the two worked side by side, neither denying the other, each enriching the other."

"That sounds ideal."

"It was. I'd like to show you how the Martians did it."

"My men are waiting."

"We'll be gone half an hour. Tell them that, sir."

The captain hesitated, then rose and called an order down the hill.

Spender led him over into a little Martian village built all of cool perfect marble. There were great friezes of beautiful animals, white-limbed cat things and yellow-limbed sun symbols, and statues of bull-like creatures and statues of men and women and huge fine-featured dogs.

"There's your answer, Captain."

"I don't see."

"The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living _is_ life; it enjoys and relishes life. You see--the statuary, the animal symbols, again and again."

"It looks pagan."

"On the contrary, those are God symbols, symbols of life. Man had become too much man and not enough animal on Mars too. And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: _Why __live?_ Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life is possible. The Martians realized that they asked the question 'Why live at all?' at the height of some period of war and despair, when there was no answer. But once the civilization calmed, quieted, and wars ceased, the question became senseless in a new way. Life was now good and needed no arguments."

"It sounds as if the Martians were quite naive."

"Only when it paid to be naive. They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that mirade. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It's all simply a matter of degree. An Earth Man thinks: 'In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of things I happen to see.' A Martian, far cleverer, would say: "This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and the mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This
thing is good.'"

There was a pause. Sitting in the afternoon sun, the captain looked curiously around at the little silent cool town. 

"I'd like to live here," he said.

"You may if you want."

"You ask _me_ that?"

"Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands? There's a little patio down here with a reel of Martian music in it at least fifty thousand years old. It still plays. Music you'll never hear in your life. You could hear it. There are books. I've gotten on well in reading them already. You could sit and read."

"It all sounds quite wonderful, Spender."

"But you won't stay?"

"No. Thanks, anyway."

"And you certainly won't let me stay without trouble. I'll have to kill you all."

"You're optimistic."

"I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion, now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?"

The captain shifted his feet. He shook his head. "I'm sorry this is happening. I'm sorry about it all."

"I am too. I guess I'd better take you back now so you can start the attack."

"I guess so."

"Captain, I won't kill you. When it's all over, you'll still be alive."

"What?"

"I decided when I started that you'd be untouched."

"Well . . ."

"I'll save you out from the rest. When they're dead, perhaps you'll change your mind."

"No," said the captain. "There's too much Earth blood in me. I'll have to keep after you."

"Even when you have a chance to stay here?"

"It's funny, but yes, even with that. I don't know why. I've never asked myself. Well, here we are." They had returned to their meeting place now. "Will you come quietly, Spender? This is my last offer."

"Thanks, no." Spender put out his hand. "One last thing. If you win, do me a favor. See what can be done to restrict tearing this planet apart, at least for fifty years, until the archaeologists have had a decent chance, will you?"

"Right."

"And last--if it helps any, just think of me as a very crazy fellow who went berserk one summer day and never was right again. It'll be a little easier on you that way."

"I'll think it over. So long, Spender. Good luck."

"You're an odd one," said Spender as the captain walked back down the trail in the warm-blowing wind.

The captain returned like something lost to his dusty men. He kept squinting at the sun and breathing bard. "Is there a drink?" he said. He felt a bottle put cool into his hand. "Thanks." He drank. He wiped his mouth.

"All right," he said. "Be careful. We have all the time we want. I don't want any more lost. You'll have to kill him. He won't come down. Make it a clean shot if you can. Don't mess him. Get it over with."

"I'll blow his damned brains out," said Sam Parkhill.

"No, through the chest," said the captain. He could see Spender's strong, clearly determined face.

"His bloody brains," said Parkhill.

The captain handed him the bottle jerkingly. "You heard what I said. Through the chest"

Parkhill muttered to himself.

"Now," said the captain.


They spread again, walking and then running, and then walking on the hot hillside places where there would be sudden cool grottoes that smelled of moss, and sudden open blasting places that smelled of sun on stone.

I hate being clever, thought the captain, when you don't really feel clever and don't want to be clever. To sneak around and make plans and feel big about making them. I hate this feeling of thinking I'm doing right when I'm not really certain I am. Who are we, anyway? The majority? Is that the answer? The majority is always holy, is it not? Always, always; just never wrong for one little insignificant tiny moment, is it? Never ever wrong in ten million years? He thought: What is this majority and who are in it? And what do they think and how did they get that way and will they ever change and how the devil did I get caught in this rotten majority? I don't feel comfortable. Is it claustrophobia, fear of crowds, or common sense? Can one man be right, while all the world thinks they are right? Let's not think about it. Let's crawl around and act exciting and pull the trigger. There, and _there! _

The men ran and ducked and ran and squatted in shadows and showed their teeth, gasping, for the air was thin, not meant for running; the air was thin and they had to sit for five minutes at a time, wheezing and seeing black lights in their eyes, eating at the thin air and wanting more, tightening their eyes, and at last getting up, lifting their guns to tear holes in that thin summer air, holes of sound and heat. 

Spender remained where he was, firing only on occasion.

"Damned brains all over!" Parkhill yelled, running uphill.

The captain aimed his gun at Sam Parkhill. He put it down and stared at it in horror. "What were you doing?" he asked of his limp hand and the gun.

He had almost shot Parkhill in the back.

"God help me."

He saw Parkhill still running, then falling to lie safe.

Spender was being gathered in by a loose, running net of men. At the hilltop, behind two rocks, Spender lay, grinning with exhaustion from the thin atmosphere, great islands of sweat under each arm. The captain saw the two rocks. There was an interval between them of some four inches, giving free access to Spender's chest.

"Hey, you!" cried Parkhill. "Here's a slug for your head!"

Captain Wilder waited. Go on, Spender, he thought. Get out, like you said you would. You've only a few minutes to escape. Get out and come back later. Go on. You said you would. Go down in the tunnels you said you found, and lie there and live for months and years, reading your fine books and bathing in your temple pools. Go on, now, man, before it's too late.

Spender did not move from his position.

"What's wrong with him?" the captain asked himself.

The captain picked up his gun. He watched the running, hiding men. He looked at the towers of the little clean Martian village, like sharply carved chess pieces lying in the afternoon. He saw the rocks and the interval between where Spender's chest was revealed.

Parkhill was charging up, screaming in fury.

"No, Parkhill," said the captain. "I can't let you do it. Nor the others. No, none of you. Only me." He raised the gun and sighted it.
Will I be clean after this? he thought. Is it right that it's me who does it? Yes, it is. I know what I'm doing for what reason and it's right, because I think I'm the right person. I hope and pray I can live up to this. He nodded his head at Spender. "Go on," he called in a loud whisper which no one heard. "I'll give you thirty seconds more to get away. Thirty seconds!"

The watch ticked on his wrist, The captain watched it tick. The men were running. 

Spender did not move. 

The watch ticked for a long time, very loudly in the captain's ears. "Go on, Spender, go on, get away!"

The thirty seconds were up.

The gun was sighted. The captain drew a deep breath.

"Spender," he said, exhaling.

He pulled the trigger.

All that happened was that a faint powdering of rock went up in the sunlight. The echoes of the report faded.


The captain arose and called to his men: "He's dead."

The other men did not believe it. Their angles had prevented their seeing that particular. fissure in the rocks. They saw their captain run up the hill, alone, and thought him either very brave or insane.

The men came after him a few minutes later.

They gathered around the body and someone said, "In the chest?" 

The captain looked down. "In the chest," he said, He saw how the rocks had changed color under Spender. "I wonder why he waited. I wonder why he didn't escape as he planned. I wonder why he stayed on and got himself killed."

"Who knows?" someone said.

Spender lay there, his hands clasped, one around the gun, the other around the silver book that glittered in the sun.

Was it because of me? thought the captain. Was it because I refused to give in myself? Did Spender hate the idea of killing me? Am I any different from these others here? Is that what did it? Did he figure he could trust me? What other answer is there?

None. He squatted by the silent body.

I've got to live up to this, he thought. I can't let him down now. If he figured there was something in me that was like himself and couldn't kill me because of it, then what a job I have ahead of me! That's it, yes, that's it. I'm Spender all over again, but I think before I shoot. I don't shoot at all, I don't kill. I do things with people. And he couldn't kill me because I was himself under a slightly different condition.

The captain felt the sunlight on the back of his neck.

He heard himself talking: "If only he had come to me and talked it over before he shot anybody, we could have worked it out somehow."

"Worked what out?" said Parkhill. "What could we have worked out with _his_ likes?"

There was a singing of heat in the land, off the rocks and off the blue sky. 

"I guess you're right," said the captain.

"We could never have got together. Spender and myself, perhaps. But Spender and you and the others, no, never, He's better off
now. Let me have a drink from that canteen."

It was the captain who suggested the empty sarcophagus for Spender. They had found an ancient Martian tomb yard. They
put Spender into a silver case with waxes and wines which were ten thousand years old, his hands folded on his chest. The last
they saw of him was his peaceful face. 

They stood for a moment in the ancient vault. "I think it would be a good idea for you to think of Spender from time
to time," said the captain.

They walked from the vault and shut the marble door.


The next afternoon Parkhill did some target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and
blowing the tops off the fragile towers. 

The captain caught Parkhill and knocked his teeth out.

* * *​


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## Kyle R (Jun 11, 2012)

Woops. Okay, there. I fixed the formatting. Go ahead, give that story a read ^ if you like.

One of my favorites of his! (Though to be fair, I have more than a hundred favorites of his )


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## garza (Jun 12, 2012)

My regret is that I watched the video and then read more by and about Ray Bradbury. Better he should have remained a shadowy figure I knew of only as a writer of the sorts of stories I'm not fond of reading. True, he looked like my grandfather, but only a part, a small part, of his message rang true.

Perhaps I'm reacting to Bradbury's statement differently from the way I would if physically he did not resemble my grandfather so closely. When Bradbury says, 'You're here on this Earth to enjoy yourself' my immediate reaction is, no, that's wrong. That's rose-garden philosophy. 

 My grandfather said to find something I enjoyed doing that would make a decent living and I'd never have to work. We had long talks about that, and his idea was that we can put more effort into and be more efficient when the way we make a living involves doing something we want to do rather than doing something we find unpleasant. 

But he also said that it's a cruel world we are born into. He would never have made so flippant a remark as 'You're here on this Earth to enjoy yourself'. He would have called that errant nonsense. He would say to tell that to a starving child or tell that to an old person with no money for medicine or food.

Over the past few days I've dug up and read a good deal of Bradbury. I am not so impressed as I thought I'd be. His writing is technically good, but the stories don't touch me. I'll stay with Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, and company. They wrote about the reality of life in the world we are born into. 

Read Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt and then tell me about being 'here on this Earth to enjoy yourself'. Come with me to the refugee villages where the families continue to mourn children slaughtered in the civil war in El Salvador 20 and 30 years ago and tell those people 'You are here on this Earth to enjoy yourself'.


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## Sunny (Jun 12, 2012)

Hmmmm..... "enjoy yourself while on this earth". I think it's a great statement. 

I know some people have it worse than others. Some people would let what they can't control bring them down, and they destroy who they are from self-pity of living in bad circumstances. I think, people are capable of becoming stronger, becoming better people from hard struggles in life. 

Just an example of a great friend I had. She is a beautiful girl, who was raped repeatedly by her father from the time she was 12 until she hit 17. He was a high-school teacher, and her mother a lawyer. When she was only 17, he rowed his boat out to the middle of the lake at their cottage and tied a rope around his ankle and rock to the other end. He killed himself and she thought it was all her fault. The students from the school she attended all blamed her, because he was a well liked teacher. She had to drop out of school, and went on a huge downhill spiral from there.

Yes, she had many years where she was unstable, and depressed and mutilated herself. And, even to this day, I know she still struggles. But, she'd made a decision as well - one that Bradbury said, "She'd enjoy her life while on this earth!" She didn't want to spend what was left of her life, feeling sorry for herself and what had happened to her. Just an example - I know there are people with all different degrees of awfulness they deal with.

And, I also know there are so many people that have things a lot worse than you or I will ever experience, but a lot of people that have it rough - still enjoy their lives, they take the good from what they can, and focus on that.

Only my opinion, though. I think, find what you love... in work, in family, in life, in love, in friends, in nature, in a pet... whatever it is, and just... enjoy yourself with what you can, while you're here. Enjoy your time.


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## Kyle R (Jun 12, 2012)

garza said:
			
		

> He would never have made so flippant a remark as 'You're here on this Earth to enjoy yourself'. He would have called that errant nonsense. He would say to tell that to a starving child or tell that to an old person with no money for medicine or food.
> 
> Come with me to the refugee villages where the families continue to mourn children slaughtered in the civil war in El Salvador 20 and 30 years ago and tell those people 'You are here on this Earth to enjoy yourself'.



These sound like people who are need of hope, love, support, and optimism more than anything. 

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is applicable in this discussion. 

Maslow's hierarchy of needs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia







Bradbury's message of being grateful for life is addressing--and being delivered from--the level of Esteem and Self-Actualization.

Those who are suffering in the Physiological and Safety levels of course can't benefit from, nor relate to, that message, as they still have more immediate needs that need to be fulfilled.

It's tragic and unfortunate when someone is having problems with one or many needs, such as health, nutrition, shelter, and safety. Especially tragic when it is because of the cruelty of others. Also tragic when it is because of undeserved misfortune.

I don't think anyone here would argue otherwise.

But those exceptions don't, in my opinion, negate Bradbury's message of loving life. If anything, these are examples where the responsibility falls upon the shoulders of those who _are_ at the levels where loving life is an option, to do something to help those less fortunate, to help them, in any way possible.

So, I'm sorry you disagree with Bradbury, garza, but I respect your right to do so. I understand your grandfather shared a perspective with you that was more cautionary and perhaps because of that, and/or your career, you are keenly aware of the suffering of others.

Likewise, though, I reserve the right to respectfully disagree with your (and Writ's) depiction of Ray as ignorant and naive. I've read enough of his writing to recognize he is anything but.

It's possible to disagree with the man without insulting him or belittling him, is all I wish to say. 

Cheers!


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## JosephB (Jun 12, 2012)

Could be -- but I doubt Bradbury was talking to an audience of El Salvadoran refugees.


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## garza (Jun 12, 2012)

Perhaps he should have been. 

My apologies for having offended, but I cannot in good conscience endorse a philosophy of life that says my reason for existence is so shallow. Those of us who've never gone hungry have no right to disregard those who are starving. Those of us who've never been homeless have no right to ignore those for whom 'home' is a cardboard box in a city alleyway, or a bit of ground in the deep bush. When we become self-centred to the point we can say 'life is here for me to enjoy' we dishonour those millions whose lives are given over to a struggle to survive.

Some wealthy U.S. expatriates made the mistake of inviting Emory King to Thanksgiving dinner and asking him to say a blessing. Emory said he stood and looked down the long table with a monster-sized turkey at either end and an enormous ham in the middle. In between were all the side dishes one associates with a harvest-home feast. He bowed his head and said, 'Lord, forgive us for having so much when there are so many who have so little. Amen'. Emory told me he was never invited back.


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## JosephB (Jun 12, 2012)

That sounds like a load of self-righteous baloney. Bradbury's message is just a variation on the standard stop and smell the roses/follow your dreams kind of spiel. Kind of banal -- but depending on who you're talking to -- like students, people at a writing conference or book-signing or whatever -- there's nothing wrong with it. Certainly nothing to suggest he was disregarding the plight of people who are starving or homeless etc. That's all you. He said, enjoy life. Not enjoy life and to hell with everyone else.

There's no need to parade around in sack cloth. It's perfectly possible to enjoy life to its fullest and be grateful for what you have -- and still recognize and sympathize with others in the world who are far less fortunate.


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## Mr mitchell (Jun 12, 2012)

Rest in peace, sir.


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## Sunny (Jun 12, 2012)

Why can't Bradbury's message go out to those less fornuate and in bad circumstances, as well as those that have things better? Are they not allowed to reach for the stars, find what the love in their life, grasp hold of it, and love it? I don't understand how people going through hard times are not to get the benefit from Bradbury's speech as well. 

These people who live on the streets, who live in cardboard boxes, who don't eat, but pump themselves full of drugs everyday - are they not allowed to have dreams like the rest of us. Find something they love, and do just that? 

I know they can. My brother lived on the streets from the time he was 16-years-old. He lived in hostels, cardboard boxes, and the odd time, he said strangers would let him spend the night with them. He was addicted to drugs at an early age, did unheard of things to me and my family, things that I'm not sharing with the world.

At the age of almost 40, when he was lying in the ditch in the middle of a blizzard, he said it was either "die" or "love life". And he chose to "Love his life". He's had a long road to recovery, and I've heard he's doing great, after many years of struggling to get where he is. He loves to fish. That's his passion now. He found something he loved, it brings him peace, and he no longer starves everyday, steals from strangers for drugs, and he no longer sleeps in cardboard or rests his head on a dirty ground. 

So you see? Bradbury could be speaking to even those less fortunate, because well, they too can find something they love, and love their life.


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## garza (Jun 12, 2012)

It may be I've spent too many years in the heart of darkness. It may be I've been there to see too many people die.


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## Terry D (Jun 12, 2012)

I have a friend who once ran a small, independent, book store in the L.A. area.  He told me that Bradbury was famous among small book store owners for popping in and just looking around.  He would frequently offer to do book signings (he did four of them at the store my friend ran).  For the price of a sandwich and a beer he would sign books and pose for photos without charge.  In my friend's words "Ray was the nicest, most articulate author I ever had in my store.  It was fun day whenever he stopped by."


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## Sunny (Jun 12, 2012)

That's a great story Terry D! Thanks for posting that... it made me smile. ;0)


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## Writ (Jun 12, 2012)

I don't think garza was being self righteous. I'll also say Kyle (and you Joseph) made a good point about audience. As Kyle pointed out with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

But when you have much relative to many others maybe there exists a danger of developing too much of a pie-in-the-sky kind of view of life.

Really, I don't know what to say about contemporary United States. On one hand we have such a bombing prescription (and recreational) drug industry that pills aimed at relieving depression or changing moods has become a "cosmetic" industry of our psychological state now. It's been observed by others not from the U.S. - and from the U.S. - that you can find materially impoverished people in developing nations that are more happy in life than people in the U.S. middle-class. On the other hand, the media in the U.S. is always telling people (their U.S. audience) they *should *be happy, not just today but every damned day.

And I'm not sure when this philosophy in the U.S. developed because I don't think it's one the early colonist or founders of the country had. Actually, I don't think it was a philosophy most Americans subscribed to during the first half of the 20th century. 

I think it used to be that most Americans subscribed to a philosophy that more or less said that life can be tough but you pick yourself up, keep striving, and form your own destiny for good or bad. And to keep optimistic. But I'm not so sure optimism is one and the same as suggesting the purpose of life is to enjoy yourself.

Optimism, in many Anglo and Latin societies has often been viewed as a masculine virtue as opposed to dejection which has been viewed as falling into a more womanish state. But we know you can cause dejection in grown men. It's one of the primary goals of the hit and run tactics of guerrilla warfare. It was also one of the primary tools used in maintaining slavery and racial caste system throughout all of the Americas. Some would argue today Wisconsin Governor Scot Walker and the Republicans want to cause dejection among the working class of the United States today. Walker himself has been captured on tape speaking of a divide and conquer strategy.

I think people from developed nations benefit from actually setting foot in developing nations and at minimum, observing some of the material deprivation millions around the world go through. And this struggle for survival is not unique to just humans. All life on earth seems to be subject to it. In fact one of the levels of hell in Buddhism is being reborn as an "animal." Can you imagine being a stray dog or cat? Or a dog used by some human for pit bulls to attack and chew on as training for his fights he bets on? 

And even in the developed world we humans still remain vulnerable to predatory bacterial or viral diseases or injuries that can leave us permanently paralyzed from the waist down. That's not even speaking of the rare and unfortunate souls that endure the hell of "locked in syndrome" where your eyes are open but you can not speak nor move. Amazingly, through the help of a friend, some guy that suffered locked in syndrome for years authored a book. 

This pie-in-the-sky philosophy of life is popular today in Christian and spiritual literature being authored. One reason some have critically stated Christian literature today sucks compared to it;s glory era in the 1800's and early 1900's. I've read a couple of Anglican C.S. Lewis books and I never got the sense he was suggesting life is simply about enjoying yourself or being happy all the time. 

For me... I was not changed as a person when I partied down in Tijuana, Mexico as a gringo Marine, even when I observed the great scale of poverty. But the scale of it and witnessing elderly people sitting dirty on the streets, and large numbers of small children begging (I'm sure many were placed out there by adults or mothers to "hustle" tourists via appealing to their sympathy, but nonetheless), did help inform me right up close, that my privileged life in the U.S. was not the norm for millions or maybe billions across the earth.  

Garza also is well traveled and has spent years in war torn developing nations. He's developed personal relationships with those that have endured "the passion of Christ" so to speak. So, this understandably would shape his own views of "the real world" as we say. 

*Incidentally*, I've been reading a couple non-fiction books on boxing. One has an essay speaking about the former Stillman's Gym of New York. A famous boxing gym that once existed. The gym goes back to the 1920's I think and all the way up into the 1960's it had like 300 or more people training in the thing. And old school, dirty, and dark gym. But the gym is closed today and in all of New York state there are only roughly 300 professional fighters licensed to box. This includes those fighters from outside of the state that are licensed to fight in New York. The population of the U.S. has ballooned but both the numbers of boxing gyms and fighters around the country has dramatically shrank. Both the quality of trainers and fighters has continually begun diminish. A big reason why the U.S. no longer so dominates the professional boxing world as it once did. Our "poor" have even gotten to live like kings and queens compared to many around the world. In some ways we are a more materially pampered society then those generations of Americans that came before us. 

(I'm not trying to bash Bradbury or cause dejection in anyone either. It's a blessing to be happy and a virtue to have optimism even in the face of great suffering or struggle. We do have a role in our own happiness. Much of that depends on if we view our glass half empty or half full as well as the choice we make early or late in life. However, we shouldn't just dismiss the real anguish and struggles so many other humans and lower animal species have to endure during their long journey through life. That's not a virtue to be so blind or dismissive)


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## JosephB (Jun 12, 2012)

Well, it's clear Bradbury made a lot of people happy. This thread was aimed at his fans -- so why not let them honor his life and achievements instead of gunking it up with a lot of obvious and/or beside-the-point blather?


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## garza (Jun 12, 2012)

Fair enough. I've already written another post, but let it go.

edit - I do regret watching the video, but how was I to know?


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## Terry D (Jun 12, 2012)

Writ said:


> And I'm not sure when this philosophy in the U.S. developed because I don't think it's one the early colonist or founders of the country had. Actually, I don't think it was a philosophy most Americans subscribed to during the first half of the 20th century.



We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and *the pursuit of Happiness*.  

It was important enough for the founding fathers to write it into the Declaration of Independence.

I'm not saying anyone has to agree with Bradbury, or even that his point-of-view (as much of it as can be deciphered from a three minute video) wasn't somewhat simplistic in light of the problems facing so much of the world's population.  But, I think if you read much of his work you'll find that he had a very dark and pessimistic view of what people are capable of.  The apples Ray handed out in his work were often full of worms, so I don't think his perspective was quite as pie-in-the-sky as it seems at first glance.


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