Dandelion Wine & The Wonder of Words

I had some free time the last three days or so thus I read Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. I was intoxicated by the glasses full of sentences. Drank it up with relish and left with a deep regret that it is all gone. A great book ends like an empty bottle yet the taste lingers on and on in the mouth of my mind.

I have always had a love affair with words. Yet, becoming an English teacher was never a goal which would seem like an appropriate path for a word aficionado. Not for me. I found the classroom like a cage, lashing my words to bars of punctuation and spelling and eating the gruel of grammar. There is a time to scrub the prose and poetry but first get a body of work of words down. Even worse, being a Librarian and ordering children to spit out their gum. That was from back in the day and not the current reality.

I suppose words just are ideas, a way to label something wonderful. Maybe like Adam naming the animals at Creation.

I am going to be teaching a course next year in College and Career and I swear that I am going to focus on the quality of my students ideas--like Martin Luther King Jr's wishing that his children would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin--versus all the rules of writing and etc.Even when I watch TV, I gravitate to shows about authors and books like CSPAN 2 over the weekend.

A CSPAN 2 interviewer asked a elderly veteran writer yesterday what advice he would give would-be writers. He gave an unoriginal answer "Don't quit your day job. And and don't lose it" but he said it with a palpable shudder and obvious conviction that the words registered as solemn advice rather than the popular rejoinder rag.     

There was a very long time that I could not read fiction because it was not "real." I tended towards biography and history. Kind of odd because Jesus told a lot of parables that were not true in the sense that they had actually happened in time and space but the stories became the mediums for deeper truth. C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia turned on the light in the attic of my imagination.  

I suppose that I took fiction for granted. A dandelion of sorts in the field of flower facts. Lots of fiction can be trashy. Not constrained by "reality", some writer abuse words and make them do all kinds of evil deeds like smut or violence. As Pimps to Prostitutes. Words should be treasured and guarded. That is why I find so much of popular culture distasteful. Words are demeaned and cheapened, made bawdy or bad. I want to protect them, nurture them, grow them.

It got me further thinking why we treat dandelions like weeds. The definition of a weed is a plant not useful aesthetically or nutritionally, etc. Who decreed the dandelion to such a fate? Why do we inject our grass with lethal chemicals to wipe them out? So, they are not roses. Are they still not beautiful in their own simple understated way? Words too are wonderful, even the simple and common ones.

Spoiler Alert: I picked some of the sentences like flowers out of Dandelion Wine to share with you. I will add some additional fermenting thoughts of my own:

- A common flower, a weed that no one sees. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion. This is the first sentence I wrote down from the book and it a salvo shot of sorts. Bradbury stakes his book on the premise that the dandelion is worthy of honor, for it marks the seasons of life.

- Susurrant and Slumbrous. Just two very cool words, no context here from me.

- And death was the lonely one. An evocative emotional image, death comes for all, alone. Made me think of the verse in Revelation of death itself being destroyed as the final act before the New Heavens and Earth. Praise God.

- No sanctuary in life. True enough in the earthly sense. Suffering is the common lot of man.

- Happiness Machine. In the book, the Happiness Machine overheats, catches fire, and explodes. Makes me think of the truth that when we pursue happiness as our goal, we break it. Better to aim for Truth. Only the Truth sets us free even if makes us unhappy in some lesser way to achieve a greater good.

-  Who wants a sunset to last? A powerful reminder that the passing of things makes them memorable. As such, it increases their value.

- You are always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person that you are tonight. Regret is stealing from the present something unreconciled from the past.

- War is never a winning thing. You lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. War often becomes land for lives. A tragic trade really. Dirt for Souls. Not a flake of dust from the guns at Shiloh...

- What else did I miss? The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing. We would all be a lot better off slowing down. I have noticed the stress of being in the fast lane on roads where those behind put persistent pressure on those ahead. Why are we in such a hurry? We miss so much.

- I'm the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming. I suppose we are all waiting to be rescued. The Parousia promises this for those in Christ Jesus.

- And, besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard, it's like morning again and I am starting the day over. Like a mid-day shower clears the atmosphere and cleans the air, so does crying. I think it would be a better world if we cried more. I was a lot happier as a child than I am as an adult. And I cried a lot more as a kid. I have to wonder if there is a relationship.

- They departed like pale fragments of a final twilight in the history of a dying world. About the most profound elegy ever to the firefly.

- One day you discover that you are alive. What a miracle life is. Matter contemplating matter, there must be more.