Dandelion wine

I guess for most people Ray Bradbury is Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 and "a master of science fiction". I love all these and have read them over and over again. But among my ten desert island books, I would choose Dandelion Wine, and I would also claim that it is the best book ever written about childhood. About all the anguish of being a child and first discovering that you are alive and, as a consequence, that you are mortal. Wondering over the strangeness of adult life in which a ninety-five-year-old woman and a forty-year-old man recognise each other from a previous life and hope to meet in the future (no, I don't believe in reincarnation).

I fist read Dandelion Wine when was sixteen. It was disturbing - just as disturbing as a book should be. It changed my life. It changed my whole worldview. All right, let me spell it out: it is the single most important book of my life.

I didn't know and didn't care - still don't care - whether it was an autobiography. It is a beautiful piece of literature. I introduced all my friends to the book. It was a touchstone. If they were indifferent, they weren't really my friends.

I cannot imagine how you can remain indifferent to this book.

I was sixteen and was in love with, or thought I was in love with someone who was sixty. Dandelion Wine provided an answer. (This person has been dead for thirty years now. Miss Loomis would have urged me to die young. I am afraid it's too late).

"I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it".This makea more sense now than when I was sixteen.

By the way, I didn't know that lime-vanilla ice actually existed (or dandelion wine, for that matter).

I re-read the book recently, and it still goes right into my heart, every bit of it.

The copy in the picture comes from the Los Angeles Book Fair 2000. Staffan had journalist accreditation and therefore received a precious ticket to Bradbury's talk. He gave it to me.

So many things...

I haven't blogged for a while, and I don't know where to start. I should blog about wonderful days with Norton Juster when I was a bit jealous because he and Staffan got up very early and talked and talked. I should blog about the death of Maurice Sendak, trying to say something that hasn't been said by everybody else. Just two days before, Norton was telling us about Sendak - they were so close friends. Before that, I was planning to blog about another, much less famous children's writer who had passed away, Leila Berg, whose book The Adventures of Chunky, I loved passionately when I was a child. I should also blog about the anxiety and despair of a young mother whose four-year-old child is taken away from her into a hospital, with the words: "It was good you came now, two hours from now would be too late... You can call the day after tomorrow".  The memory comes as we read reports about a grandchild in a hospital in Sweden, luckily surrounded by the loving family. I should blog about Julia's little cat who, sadly, is no more, which brings memories of just a couple of months ago. I should blog about yesterday being the Victory Day in Russia and what it once meant to me. In the first place, I should blog about the imminence of three-score.

Book of the week: A Monster Calls

I started reading this highly appraised book yesterday as I went to bed, and after ten pages I wanted to put it away. Every single cliche was in it: a lonely, insecure protagonist bullied in school, an absent father with his new wife and baby, a sick mother, a busybody granny, an inconsiderate teacher, italics for the voice of the inner monster, and, well, the eponymous monster. I immediately thought about an award-winning and absolutely horrible Swedish young adult novel with almost identical initial set-up, that mostly renders the female protagonist's worries about getting rid of her virginity and finding ways of getting drunk on Fridays. Every now and then she visits her dying mother in hospital. I just couldn't stand another of these novels.

However, some of my students had read the book and said it was wonderful. (Not that I trust students' opinions, but I try at least to be informed about their likes and dislikes). So I gave it a chance. Then I couldn't put the book away and kept reading until well after midnight.

There are many children's and YA novels about "coping with death". I am generally not interested in the aboutness of literature, and I am definitely not interested in how to use books for therapeutic purposes. This book is the most profound narrative of denial and reconciliation I have read.

Do cats know that they are cats?

For my current research I am reading about mysterious things such as emotions, memory and consciousness. The latter seems especially controversial. There seems to be no way of saying what consciousness is, what it is for, where exactly it is, or how it interacts with the rest of the world.

What has always fascinated me is the question whether human beings are the only living creatures that have consciousness. The clever book that I am reading claims, with reference to another clever book, that a bat only has consciousness if it is conscious of what it is like to be a bat. Since bats eat cats and cats eat bats, I can modify the issue. Are cats conscious of being cats?

Another question I have contemplated a lot is whether we are conscious of being alive. In Ray Bradbury's wonderful book Dandelion Wine, the young protagonist Douglas suddenly becomes conscious of being alive. Not unexpectedly, this discovery very soon leads him to the conclusion of being mortal. We all know that we will die, but are we conscious of being mortal? And are we conscious of dying when it comes to that? I know that my grandfather wasn't, the evening before he died. I wasn't there when my father dies, but according to my mother the last thing he said before drifting into merciful unconsciousness was: “So that's what it's like”. I don't know which is preferable.

But if cats are conscious of being cats, and if they know that they are alive, are they conscious of dying? Or maybe they don't have consciousness, but still know that they are dying. Maybe they are scared. Maybe they are trying to tell us something. Maybe they are trying to say goodbye. I am positively sure that Miso was trying to say goodbye

Watching a cat slowly and peacefully dying for ten days brings up lots of big questions. Farewell, Miso. You stayed with us more than a year after we thought we had lost you.