Sci-fi writer leaves rich literary legacy

Last week the world lost a brilliant science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury. Bradbury, 91, died June 5 in Los Angeles.

As a prolific, successful author, Bradbury likely left his family a fine legacy in its financial sense; they’ve surely inherited money and/or property.

I imagine, though, that he’s left them a far richer legacy, as typified in this passage from his best-seller Fahrenheit 451:

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

Here’s hoping that Bradbury’s books will be handed down from generation to generation for many generations to come.

You may read more about his life at http://www.gjsentinel.com/breaking/articles/ray-bradbury-author-of-fahrenheit-451-dies-at-91.

Ray Bradbury in 1975
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia