Re-enchant Your Life With Ray Bradbury

Do you ever feel that you lost the enchantment of childhood? How do you reclaim it later on? One way is to read Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is an apostle of wonder who never let go of his sense of enchantment. His writing suggests that one magical moment, remembered with love, is more powerful than the sum total of painful experiences.

I dread autumn every year, and this autumn was no different. As the October air grew cool and days shortened, I felt the promise of summer fade away. How could fall be anything but an end to joy, freedom, and light?

Then I read Ray Bradbury, in whose hands a season that looks like gloom and darkness becomes bright with magic. Take, for instance, his prologue to The October Country, where he calls October “that country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.” 

Hold the gloom. There’s magic in mist, dusk, and twilight. Rather than dreading autumn, one can revel in it as a season of mystery whose lengthening twilights betoken a “deeper magic,” to borrow from C.S. Lewis, that both transcends and engulfs the visible world.

If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can revivify the childhood enchantment of October, with “everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight,” when “it seems Halloween will never come.” I remember first grade when our teacher, Mrs. Meekins, divided the class into two groups, each assigned a separate bulletin board: half the class was to create “Scarytown,” and the other, “Booville.” Kids drew and cut out construction paper picket fences, Victorian houses, graveyards, and ghosts to staple to the board. What could this mean, I wondered? Enchantment had come to school.

And to our house. My mom spent hours sewing a pink bunny costume for my first Halloween. Another year she curled thin slivers of carrot around a pencil to make red curls for a bohemian lady costume. Mom wanted me to feel magic on Halloween.

On the flip side of the seasonal cycle, in his book Dandelion Wine, Bradbury captures the enchantment of summer: “Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered... sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen. The bright, the golden, the yellow, the amber, the living malt of summer burned in their throats.” A boy reflects, "Every time you bottle it, you got a whole chunk of 1928 put away, safe.”

Or take his passage, from the same book, on the childhood magic of new tennis shoes: “Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness…. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.” 

Mr. Sanderson, the shoe salesman, queries a boy who has just tried on a new pair: “‘How do they feel?’ The boy looked down at his feet deep in the rivers, in the fields of wheat, in the wind that already was rushing him out of the town. He looked up at the old man, his eyes burning, his mouth moving, but no sound came out.  ‘Antelopes?’ said the old man, looking from the boy’s face to his shoes. ‘Gazelles?’  The boy thought about it, hesitated, and nodded a quick nod. Almost immediately he vanished. He just spun about with a whisper and went off.”

Sometimes it looks as though disenchantment has the upper hand. As a child I loved fireflies, which my dad called “lightning bugs.” They were magical creatures, and I loved to catch them gently and let them crawl up to the tip of my finger and fly away. When I was six, we moved during summertime from my early childhood home to another state. One evening, a boy I had met in our new town, the son of a family friend, grabbed a tennis racket and started swatting the poor lightning bugs, knocking them violently to the ground and killing them. Some magic in me died that night. How could life allow someone to do something so cruel? Why did he want to kill something so beautiful? This moment encapsulated the arc of disenchantment that seemed to accompany our move to this new place, and it felt as though life lost a little more magic with each passing year.

Enter Bradbury’s dandelion wine and new tennis shoes. The memory of enchanted summer evenings spent catching lightning bugs with my dad is stronger than one moment’s cruelty from a firefly-assassin, stronger than the boredom and cynicism of my school years. Bradbury teaches me to remain in the enchanting moments—to trust their power to heal whatever contradicts them, no matter how long ago they occurred. The magic is what matters. Love will triumph in the end.

The enchantment of childhood is still in you. Search yourself to find it, even if you can only remember a single instance. Sink into the sights, sounds, and smells of that moment. Let it engulf you and lift you out of despair. One magical moment is stronger than a lifetime of darkness. Bradbury shows the way.