Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury

Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser.

Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. So much for sounds. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn't just die, that couldn't be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly's gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe.

He slipped his brittle ivory legs down from the bed, marveling at their desiccation. They seemed to be things which had been fastened to his body while he slept one night, while his younger legs were taken off and burned in the cellar furnace. Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces. And now they were tampering with something more intangible— the memory; they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year.

I was in a pure fever and I was alive. It doesn't matter if being so alive kills a man; it's better to have he quick fever every time.

"I'm alive," said Douglas. "But what's the use? They're more alive than me. How come? How come?" And standing alone, he knew the answer, staring down at his motionless feet...

"You're saving cocoons." That's what he'd say. "Corsets, in a way, you can never fit again. So why save them? You can't really prove you were ever young. Pictures? No, they lie. You're not the picture."
"Affidavits?"
"No, my dear, you're not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You're not these trunks of junk and dust. You're only you, here, now— the present you."

YOU CANT DEPEND ON THINGS BECAUSE...

...like machines, for instance, they fall apart or rust or rot, or maybe never get finished at all... or wind up in garages...
...like tennis shoes, you can only run so far, so fast, and then the earth's got you again...
...like trolleys. Trolleys, big as they are, always come to the end of the line...

YOU CANT DEPEND ON PEOPLE BECAUSE...

...they go away...
strangers die...
people you know fairly well die...
friends die...
people murder people, like in books...
your own folks can die.
So... !
He held onto a double fistful of breath, let it hiss out slow, grabbed more breath, and let it whisper through his tight-gritted teeth.

SO. He finished in huge heavily blocked capitals.

SO IF TROLLEYS AND RUNABOUTS AND FRIENDS AND NEAR FRIENDS CAN GO AWAY FOR A WHILE OR GO AWAY FOREVER, OR RUST, OR FALL APART OR DIE, AND IF PEOPLE CAN BE MURDERED, AND IF SOMEONE LIKE GREAT— GRANDMA, WHO WAS GOING TO LIVE FOREVER, CAN DIE... IF ALL OF THIS IS TRUE... THEN... I, DOUGLAS SPAULDING, SOME DAY... MUST...

But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend.

The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.

...scowling around at the very real world where nothing that vaguely looked like death could be found on this quiet day.

...fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone.

It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it's an act and a mask, like every other act and mask Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn't life a play? Don't I play it well?

I've always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge.

A woman's never safe, even when ninety-five, from gossip.

"All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That's a happy ending once a day. Next morning I'm up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I'm going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay."