It’s one of those names fantasy writers like to use (often too much; I’m guilty of that) instead of a contemporary word—like study, office or library—that might break the spell, setting a reunion of old questing elves in Poughkeepsie, for instance, to mangle Ursula LeGuin’s well-known aphorism.
It’s a place where you go to reflect or write, or work alone in this world or an imagined one; a place where the Muse knows where to find you, or where you go to find her—I never know which.
It’s a quiet room.
Wherever I’ve lived I’ve always had one and I suppose at one time it was the place where I went to build models. All the pieces were there, scattered on a desk or in the box, ready to be assembled and painted, the sum of all those parts later displayed.
Many years ago I wrote an Op-Ed essay for the New York Times—you can find it archived on this website [here]—about the last model I made when I was well past boyhood: the space shuttle Columbia.
I thought Ray Bradbury might enjoy reading it. I loved his short stories and The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and had this affinity for a man who—this was my impression, anyway—had never lost a youthful sense of wonder. It also appealed to me that evidently he’d never had the desire to learn how to drive a car, which is about as close to a rite of passage as there is in our culture. Whatever his reasons—mundane no doubt—I always liked to think that maybe he’d just been too busy imagining places that couldn’t be reached on four wheels and a tank of gas.
I didn’t expect him to write back, but he did. The out-sized letterhead depicted a cross-section of a huge Victorian-like home, the floors linked by winding stairs, the many rooms crammed with ornate columns, statues, hieroglyphics, relics, paintings, faces, maps, a man on a high-stepping horse—what you might find in an attic of the imagination.
Dear Bruce Fergusson:
Thanks for your kind warm note and your lovely article. I wish you could see the huge Shuttle model that Rockwell International gave me recently, after I lectured to all their Aerospace employees!
I stopped buying model kits years ago, not because I was embarrassed, but because my hands are all thumbs, and I never could finish the damn models! I wound up putting them on the floor and—jumping on them in a frustrated rage.
Again thanks. I am glad I have been a part of your life. Now you are a part of mine.
Best,
Ray Bradbury
The world is poorer for Mr. Bradbury’s recent passing. The space shuttle has been put on the shelf (and for a while I thought my writing career had been as well). But one era of possibility leads to another. What prompted the emergence of the shuttle and its antecedents was also part of what helped create the Kepler probe, which may eventually discover that home away from home. Whatever the scientists name it, the search, in all its guises, has inspired enough books to fill libraries, and that begins with the one we lost in Alexandria. Someone once said that if we hadn’t, we’d already be there—the home away from home, that is.
Well, there will be many choices for the name of the ship that will eventually take the first of us there, but certainly one of the choices on the list should be the Ray Bradbury.
What will hopefully follow in the months and years to come—in this lair of mine that shouldn’t be too hard for the Muse to find, small as it is—won’t be done with paints and plastic cement, but it’s another beginning, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.
