Ray Bradbury
(1920 – 2012)

On a day neither too mellow nor too tart, too hot nor too cold, the ancient tin lizzie came over the desert hill traveling at commotion speed. The vibration of the various armored parts of the car caused roadrunners to spurt up in floury bursts of dust. Gila monsters, lazy displays of Indian jewelry, took themselves out of the way. Like an infestation, the Ford clamored and dinned away into the deeps of the wilderness.

“Willy, Willy, we got hold of something strange and big here. I’m scared we won’t do right by it.”

“Well, we’re not keeping anyone out, are we?”

“Who knows? Might be a quarter’s too much for some. It don’t seem right, a natural thing handled by unnatural rules. Look and tell me I’m wrong.”

William looked.

And the city was there like the first city he had seen as a boy, when his mother took him on a train across a long meadow of grass early one morning and the city rose up head by head, tower by tower, to look at him, to watch him coming near. It was that fresh, that new, that old, that frightening, that wonderful.

“I think,” said Robert, “we should take just enough to buy gas for a week, put the rest of the money in the first poor box we come to. That mirage is a clear river running, and people coming by thirsty. If we’re wise, we dip one cup, drink it cool in the heat of the day and go. If we stop, build dams, try to own the whole river. . . .”

“Tell me again, why? Why every time our luck is good, Ned Hopper jumps out of the earth?”

Robert sighed on the opera-glass lenses and wiped them on his cuff. “Because, friend Will, we are the pure in heart. We shine with a light. And the villains of the world, they see that light beyond the hills and say, ‘Why, now, there’s some innocent, some sweet all-day sucker.’ And the villains come to warm their hands at us. I don’t know what we can do about it, except maybe put out the light.”

“I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“Right now, I’m feeling sorry for Ned Hopper.”

“Sorry!”

“He never saw what we saw. He never saw what anybody saw. He never believed for one second. And you know what? Disbelief is catching. It rubs off on people.”

William searched the disinhabited land.

“Is that what happened?”

“Who knows?” Robert shook his head. “One thing sure: When folks drove in here, the city, the cities, the mirage, whatever, was there. But it’s awful hard to see when people stand in your way.”

An occasional breather, a refresher, a bit of luck, a happy meeting, can make us cling once more to this soiled small bit of existence with a ferocity that borders on and surpasses insanity. Gripe as we may, criticize as we must, when the hour comes to leave the stage, when our particular scene ends and the curtain is dropping, most of us regret that we can’t stay on for at least another act.

This book, I hope, will be your refresher. This book, I hope, will show you that for all its reality, life is still a fantasy. For it is not only what life does in the material world that counts, but how each mind sees what is done that makes the fantasy complete.

A man who is unfamiliar with the mores of his own civilization is usually enlightened and re-focused by a journey through some foreign country such as Mexico where he sees his own customs through the Looking Glass, brought into an astonishing clarity so they suddently become ridiculous or understandable, or both. So a passenger through the lands of fantasy contained in this book should return, freshened and clear of eye to his normal existence. If this book achieves only one purpose, causes you to appreciate the stuff that holds you together, gives you an awareness of life that you may have lost somewhere between childhood and here, it will have done more than enough.