A Chapbook for Burnt-Out Priests, Rabbis, and Ministers

Ray Bradbury

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781635762167
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

From the author of Fahrenheit 451, a unique collection of poetry, short stories, and essays that tackles mortality, religion, and the afterlife.
Thought-provoking, full of wonder, and with a touch of Ray Bradbury's signature sense of humor, this collection bridges science fiction and the arts to religion and taps into the core of intellectual pursuit.
Included are the soulful and over the top "They Have Not Seen The Stars," "I Live By The Invisible," "Christ on Other Planets," "If Only We Had Taller Been," "Come Whisper Me A Promise," and so much more.
One of the most celebrated 20th century authors, known for his speculative fiction, Bradbury has crossed genres with a grace possessed only by masters of the craft.His incredibly sharp wit herewith makes this a must-have for fans old and new.
"For Bradbury enthusiasts, religionists and nearly everyone else, here's a delightful scrapbook of poems and essays, familiar summations but no less vital from a brilliant young fantasist grown older but not old."— Publishers Weekly

Part One: The Reasons Why We Should Go to Space

We Americans walk out at Cape-Kennedy amidst 70-story-tall gantries and remember the future as best we can.

Our future rushes upon us. It panics us to see it loom, threatening us with fire across the sky. To read the symbols it writes on space with some prescience is our everlasting, frightening and exhilarating job.

So let us stand on the Cape together and watch those new star constellations that will not hold still, the rockets of earthmen writing fresh Columbian history upon tideless seas.

We ask ourselves what we are and we do not know.

We wish for peace and it darts ahead, eluding us in a confused chase.

Our churches feel hollowness in their bones. Their naves echo to an emptiness of people. The pews gather a filtering down of dust.

It is indeed our year of dis-ease. Put mildly, we are troubled.

The years between now and the end of the century seem long. We wonder if space can somehow give them meaning.

I believe that space will give us new purpose, destroy war and reshape our concepts of creation.

We stand on the verge of a billion-year period of new history. Our greatest age yet lies ahead. We will come from it transmuted, transformed, forever different than we are at this moment and this hour.

Walking along the shore of space we have as yet to pick up the shards and nerve endings of our new selves. We have only begun to test the nightmares and the torments which will be grander and more terrifying than any others in memory.

For man must be put back at the center of the universe, where he once began, and from which he fell away at the beginnings of knowledge, and to which he must return with the new knowledges of space.

We cannot put him at the center of things by traveling reversewise in time or thought, no. But we can put him back where he belongs with the greatest step in thinking we can gift ourselves with. And the gift is this:

Light is good. Dark is evil. Life is good. Death is evil. Man, representing this good of light and life, moves against death and universal darkness.

The chemical universe is dead and uncaring.

Only man knows, only man cares.

For it is not enough, to have a blind universe unknowing and uncaring and unseeking? To what effect a billion billion stars? What purpose nebulae and comets that pass like pale brides trailing their ghastly veils on their way to cosmic weddings, if all goes unseen?

A universe without a living flame of people warming themselves and passing on the fiery seed is indeed absurd and unthinkable.

It falls to us, then, in our sublime frailty and ignorance, to assume this mantle which we have pushed away or shrugged off as too burdensome, century following upon century.

For it is not worth considering that the flesh of man contains the very soul of Creation, the exquisite ghost machinery, inexplicable, forever mysterious, which unifies, animates and proceeds man forth on his quest for himself.

The universe builds itself an eye with which to view its dumb and bright-waiting galaxies.

It builds hands whereby to touch yet untouched mute textures of dark and light.

It makes ears with which to summon in the sounds of brute miracle grinding against miracle.

Creation in need of a tongue with which to taste the wine of this world, and to speak of that wild taste, elated at the sound of our words spoken out in the long night of history.

All of space and time inhaling through the nostrils of man to smell the sweet wind of life transcendent among so much death.

We represent the Life Force in the universe. If it sees it sees through us. If it hears it hears with our ears. Its hand stretches out only as we stretch forth our hand, its fingers touch only where we touch.

This is no blasphemous observation, surely.

It is a triumphant, a joyous, a saving, an invigorating discovery, or rediscovery, as you wish.

And Creation does not intend to risk its sentience, its awareness, its chance for eternity, by allowing itself to remain upon one lonely planet earth.

It skins itself now in metals, propels itself with fires, and prepares to journey across space.

We see man playing with his toy rockets, but with double vision, must look again and again, and see man lifted in those rockets to survive forever.

Yet there is a darkness in us that makes us, at times, tired and in torment, not want to be good, not want to care, not want to live.

This we must fight with all the will and power in us, all the light and warmth on our search away from war toward peace.

Since men started parting themselves off from the beasts and wished for the name of man, which we have yet to earn, man has suffered as much from himself as from his environment.

Yet we go on testing our tribal muscles, yodeling war cries of our manhood, riding the self-made machine-avalanche of destruction down the mountain to bury ourselves.

What hope does space offer us here?

Well, war exists for more reasons than can be run through a computer in our lifetime. But basically we guess it stays with us because it excites men, tests their virility, exercises their vanity, stimulates their imaginations; because of nation states, power inequalities, the natural aggrandizements built into the nervous systems of men, mental illness…finish out the list yourself.

What substitute can we find for war? We have searched since Cain slew Abel for some final channeling of our violence into creativity, for some peace as powerful, as inebriating, as soul-satisfying at times, as war.

Is space at long last our peaceful substitute for Armageddon?

I think it is.

Let us, in this century, find a proper enemy.

Let us find one worth attacking, doing battle with, worth destroying.

The proper enemy of mankind is not mankind.

His proper enemy is the vastness of space, the lifelessness of the universe, the unseeing void, the great graveyard of beyond; infinity all blind, raw, dumb and uncaring.

This brute mineral and light-year beast must be subdued.

Would man be excited all over again? Space challenges him with excitements. Does he wish to be tested for strength and courage? Space will test and grow him hard and pull him tall. Does he doubt his virility? He need doubt no more; space will see to that. Does he wish to be destroyed in a just cause? Space is that cause, which will annihilate many men so that the race itself can survive.

Here indeed is an enemy greater, more unknown, more terrible, than ever encountered in the lists of old battles. Here indeed is the evil giant waiting on the immense beanstalk that must be climbed.

For our enemy is everywhere. It is all of the deeps that know no warmth. It is the great winter of time that would snow us to sleep forever. All that has ever lived, all that has ever loved, confronts us.

So the great war, the best war, the one worth declaring and fighting, still lies ahead. We gird ourselves in rocket armors to struggle with idiot cold and the untaught stars which must learn our ways.

So even as our priests and parsons look to the sky, so must our makers and implementers of war.

Where now Pope and military general and political planner of national purpose meet on common ground, or rather star-filled, tenuous, but common air.

We have saved national purpose until last, as must be obvious, because it must begin to echo more and more strongly this new image and the peaceful militarism similarly informed and dedicated to our preservation by doing rightful combat in space against the very essence of annihilation itself. We are God’s children, which the military must protect in rockets, and which the religions of the world must help carry upward from our seedbed earth.

So the cycle begins.

What is now national purpose becomes international, what was international becomes planetary, and what was planetary becomes interplanetary, and finally, at the end of the long corridor of eternity, interstellar.

True, we have not as yet solved all our problems of race, color, overpopulation, disease, starvation and strife upon this earth. These must be tended to. These will be solved. But solved, again, to what purpose? Now is not too early to pose such questions and begin the multitudinous answerings.

If reaching for immortality is our purpose, if God wishes us to live forever on out through and past the Coalsack nebulae, then our national purpose is indeed international and beyond. We plan for the one single race of men upon this world.

Now, looking to the sky, our intelligence must warn us how to travel in radioactive emptiness. Our passion must inform us with desire to keep us in ceaseless motion. For if we fail, pause, stop, we are no better than alkaline dusts and mindless seas of brine that move only by the gravitational pull of dead moons.

But, we have got out of bed, have gone to the moon, we have reached up to fingerprint Mars. And to those who look at telescopic printouts and say: “Mars is empty, there is no life there,” we shout:

There is life on Mars, and it is us.

We are the Martians.

We give ourselves a gift of us.

We are more than water, we are more than earth, we are more than sun. We are the Life Force giving itself a reason for being.

So shape our next one hundred American years.

So shape the thousand years ahead for man on earth. So shape ten thousand years of men gone strange in space. So shape ten million years, on to a billion.

Life wishes this.

We hear.

And, one flesh go to make it so.

In H.G. Wells’s screenplay for “Things to Come,” in a vast telescope mirror, the fathers of two astronauts watch the small fire of their rocket moving toward the moon, and one speaks: “My God, is there never to be an age of happiness? Is there never to be rest?”

To which the other answers: “Rest enough for the individual man. Too much of it and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man no rest and no ending. He must go on—conquest beyond conquest. This little planet, its winds and ways, and all the laws of mind...

Table of contents

• A Chapbook for Burnt-out Priests, Rabbis, and Ministers
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• They Have Not Seen the Stars
• Shaw!
• We Are the Reliquaries of Lost Time
• Of What Is Past, or Passing, or to Come
• The First Book of Dichotomy, the Second Book of Symbiosis
• If Only We Had Taller Been
• Leviathan ’99
• Come Whisper Me a Promise
• Thoughts on Visiting the Main Rocket Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral for the First Time
• Old Ahab’s Friend, and Friend to Noah, Speaks His Piece
• They Have Cut off the Heads in the Paintings
• From Death, the Brightest Seed
• Of What Is Past, or Passing or to Come II
• Troy
• That Woman on the Lawn
• The Supper After the Last Supper
• If Man Is Dead, Then God Is Slain
• Eccentrics Must Truly Have Loved God. They Made So Many of Him
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Has Anyone Ever Seen Anyone Reading in the Christian Science Reading Rooms?
• What I Do Is Me–For That I Came
• I Carry Always the Invisible
• Because of All Those Maggot Bites
• Christus Apollo
• King of Kings
• Goodbye Means God Be With You
• Joy Is the Grace We Say to God
• God Blows the Whistle
• Go Not With Ruins in Your Mind
• God Is a Child; Put Toys in the Tomb
• God for a Chimney Sweep
• We Are the Carpenters of an Invisible Cathedral
• Part One: The Reasons Why We Should Go to Space
• Part Two: Blueprints for Light-and-Sound at Canaveral; How to Do it
• Which Shall It Be?
• I Live By the Invisible
• G. B. S.: Refurbishing the Tin Woodman; Science Fiction with a Heart, a Brain, and the Nerve!
• Christ on Improbable Planets
• Connect with Diversion Books