by Ray Bradbury
There was, then, a confluence of kings who sent their ships to spice and gold. Today there is no such desire in our Congress or our president for similar goals.
What must happen next?
Can Science Fiction writers, inspirers of futures, cause a seed change in the American imagination so that, in turn, our leaders can be influenced? For remember when Admiral Byrd touched the North Pole, he cried, “Jules Verne leads me!” Where are the Jules Vernes, alive today to change our ways?
Let me make a list of some possible alternatives. Why not encourage our original competitor, Russia, to get back in the chase?
Signs indicate that there’s a slow return to Communist authority, which might well mean not only authoritarian politics that kept millions in bondage, but also the arrogance which caused them to circumnavigate space with Gagarin. Properly provoked and still aggravated at our “Tear down the wall,” might they not desire to beat us to Mars?
Or consider our two great enemies/friends. Germany, after all, lost two wars at our hands. France was saved from those two wars by our help. There’s every reason for those two nations to hate us.
Why not irritate some new Wernher von Braun in Berlin to invent a Mars rocket and beat us to a landing? And the French, stung by their defeats and the salvation we offered, mightn’t they want to send a foreign legion to the deserts of Mars?
And yet again Japan, an American-conquered nation, remembering the intrusion of Admiral Perry in Tokyo Harbor. And from the ruins of Hiroshima, might they not send a rocket to touch Phobos and Deimos and move beyond Mars to Centauri?
Or perhaps Canada, that invisible nation, ignored for centuries. Might they, in a macho gesture, fling themselves into space?
Or, most incredible of all, imagine that the Vatican decided that Pope John III wished to build a spacecraft titled the Holy Ghost in order to fly across the universe in search of the beginnings of Creation. With the Moon as base and Mars as second manger, that pope might move on to study the wellsprings of the cosmos.
What, then, would be the effect on our prejudiced secular America? Would we not build a bigger, better, and almost more holy rocket to follow the ecclesiastical dusts?
Or what if the Muslims … ?
But no, perish the thought.
Put all these together, shove them in tomorrow’s slot machine, and pull the handle. If the totals come up with three swastikas, three hammer and sickles, or three papal crowns with honeybee insignia, the results may well be the same.
What we need now is a competition of hatreds and loves. The final reward on Mars might well be not spices or gold, but the squashing of egos and a promise of immortality.
In any event, time is running out. Congress, as usual, is imitating Sleeping Beauty. It is time to waken from the slumber.
That footprint on the Moon is being filled with eternal dust and Mars still waits to have its canals filled with our dreams. Where, oh where, is the technological madman to wake us from our slumbers and provide us with the proper destiny?
Tomorrow morning, may that madman be born.
ABOUT PARIS
PARIS: ALWAYS DESTROYED, ALWAYS TRIUMPHANT (1986)
Let me tell you a somewhat lengthy story.
Recently my wife and I traveled to Paris again, where friends asked us what we were doing there. We replied, “We have come to celebrate your failed revolution.”
At which point there was a terrible silence among our Parisian friends. Before they could haul off and hit me, I proceeded to explain.
“Well, didn’t your revolution fail? You wound up two hundred years ago with the Terror, you inherited Napoleon, Lafayette was imprisoned in Holland and had to be released through a letter from George Washington. You then moved on into the nineteenth century with a series of new, smaller, failed revolutions, the reestablishment of the king and the failure of the king, the Commune in Paris in 1870 when you fought the Germans outside the city and yourselves inside the city, and all was a failure. Then in 1914 you lost that war, and we had to come rescue you. In 1940 you lost a war again, and we had to come over with Patton and Montgomery and de Gaulle to save your face. Isn’t it wonderful that in the face of all this despair, all this failure, you seized forth the most beautiful country in the world and the most beautiful city, Paris?”
At which point my French friends lunged forward, grasped me in a rib-cracking hug, and gave me multitudinous kisses. All was well.
And indeed it is strange that out of such a terrible history, this magnificent country and this incredible city were born.
I return to Paris each year, if possible on Bastille Day, so I can go up on the Eiffel Tower and watch the city explode with fireworks.
If I were to advise you as a tourist on what to do the first day or the first week in the city, it would be to stroll alone, with no others, across Paris, stopping every half hour at an outdoor café to have a coffee or a beer or an aperitif, and carry under your arm a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Every year when I go back, I do not take a copy of Fitzgerald’s book—I always buy a new one and write in it: “Paris, 1998,” “1999,” or “2000.” I have a number of copies of Tender Is the Night on my shelf at home to remind me of my excursions in the great city. It strikes me as the perfect novel to read in the ambience of that great environment.
If you stand in front of Notre-Dame and look to your left, you will see a street that’s no more than an alley that extends for the good part of a mile. If you enter this alley and walk from one end to the other, you will encounter at least six hundred restaurants. On each block there are thirty restaurants on one side and thirty on the other. And so it goes, all the way down to the boulevard Saint-Michel and beyond.
The business of Paris is eating, as it should be for every city of the world that counts as a city. Paris has twenty thousand restaurants, and so in any direction that you move, you are surrounded by millions of people outdoors, eating, in even the middle of winter.
My wife and I were in Paris at the time of the great soccer matches with international teams. On the Thursday before we were to leave, France was victorious over Croatia. From our hotel window, we saw the beginning of madness. The city was stirring alive in mobs to celebrate this wonderful victory. We had to leave the next day, Saturday, to return by Concorde to the United States. I arrived back in L.A. late Saturday night, and the next day was to be the final between France and Brazil. I had to go to the desert and have never learned to drive, so when I went out of L.A. I hired a limousine, in the back of which was a television set. I never use such devices when I travel—I always find the scenery of greater interest—but on this particular day in the afternoon, Paris, across the world, was combating Brazil. I suddenly remembered the words I had spoken to my dear friends in France: “From the history of failure, you have snatched success.” And so as I watched France with its long history of lost wars, I could not help but speak over and over again, “Oh, please, God, let them win. They haven’t won a war in two hundred years. Let them battle well, and let there be a great triumph this day that will make the entire country go mad, at last, with the knowledge that they have accomplished something with such a terrible history behind them.” The encounter went on, and I became more nervous and began to shout in my mind, and finally, at the end of the game, France won. On TV I witnessed a country gone terribly wild with joy, because at long last, at the end of too many years, a war had been won and France could arise from the ashes in triumph. So much for France, so much for Paris. Bastille night all over again, but an even better Bastille.
THE SIXTY-MINUTE LOUVRE: PARIS BY STOPWATCH (1993)
If you had no other choice, would you tour the Louvre in sixty minutes, no more, no less?
Perhaps a dumb question, but in life we are often forced to do things that, on normal days, we would refuse.
Another question: What if you were a traveler from a far place and someone offered you one single chance to see Paris, but only for ninety minutes?
Wha
t if you knew you might never return again, so you had best take the opportunity, risk the chance, and see the fabulous French city in just five thousand four hundred seconds?
Or imagine that you have been dead for a few hundred years and God comes to you in your long sleep and says, I will gift you with the most incredible place of places, but only for one hour and a half. Called back to life, to Paris, would you refuse?
I would not. I could not. I did not.
Years ago, I had to make the swift decision. Traveling from Calais to Paris to Rome by train, I arrived at dusk one April evening in a sleeping car with a private room. On board the train with me were my friend Lord Kilbracken and his girlfriend. When they learned there was to be a ninety-minute stopover for me in Paris before I trained on to Italy, they begged me to leave my luggage on board and come with them for a quick dinner before racing across Paris to catch my train. Fearful, I refused. They argued and won! With great doubt I abandoned my train at six o’clock that night, and we took a taxicab across Paris to Les Deux Magots.
Paris and the twilight seized and held me immediately. It was the blue hour, the hour of enchantment. As we motored past the Louvre, it was painted ancient gold by the sun. Every leaf on every bush or every tree was bronzed with twilight illumination. As we rounded the Place de la Concorde, to our right the Church of the Madeleine was a fiery temple, and yet farther on as we rushed, the Arc de Triomphe burned with fading light and the Eiffel Tower was a great pure torch that showed our way to where we vanished along the way to sitting out in the cool dusk drinking aperitifs at Les Deux Magots.
By that time I was exhilarated and in tears: I had died and been delivered to a place of golden coins that minted themselves by the tens of thousands from gods’ mouths in fountains. All of the talk I heard, though I understood none of it, was wise and mythical and rare. All of the people walked or sat with faces bright and colored into masks by the last of the sun. The drink in my hand was a vintage two thousand years old. Among legions of young men, I thought I saw Caesar stride by in his pride! My friends, seated with me, were dipped in gilt and capable of living forever.
But time was passing.
Already it was six-thirty. We had but an hour to find a small bistro and devour a meal. Just down the street and in a small alley, we found the amazing chicken and a wine from the tomb of a king somehow preserved to give wits to our tongues. We could not help but to speak now Camus, now Molière, now Voltaire-Berlitz!
But suddenly the golden light was gone, the chicken devoured, the bottle empty. Our time was up! It was seven o’clock! Only thirty minutes in which to find a cab and catch my precious train!
With sudden panic we paid the bill and rushed along the streets shouting, waving. No taxis anywhere! Or if there were, they were full, while still others, empty, refused to stop!
Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed in madness as the three of us waved, shouted, despaired. I imagined my luggage leaving without me as the train roared off.
But, at last, a taxicab. We leaped in with great shouts of relief and sped through a Paris still faintly radiant with torches long ago carried up from Rome.
At the railroad station, my train was slowly beginning to move! I yelled, fled from my friends and leaped aboard only in time. Eyes brimming with relief and joy I shall recall forever, I waved to my friends, who diminished away in the twilight and Paris into a special past.
I stood in the window for a long while, savoring the wine and the silhouettes of Paris sinking into a river of night. I knew that I had been privileged by accident or by my friends’ design to enjoy a most particular, if peculiar, Paris by stopwatch. I would come back in later years again and again, but it would never be a similar special adventure as impromptu, as silly, as lovely as this had been.
I had been challenged to a race, or I had fallen victim to a folly, or God had wakened me from a long morbidity of sleep and handed me those ninety minutes to do with as I wished. I had answered the call, run the folly, drunk the wine, and now? I was immensely happy.
I do not recommend my journey to everyone. But sometimes, late at night, I am on that train again and I arrive and Paris is waiting in an amazing light like dawn, and I cry out in my sleep, glad for those five thousand four hundred seconds of special time, and then I wake up, happy to remember. What if I had never come back to Paris? Would the ninety-minute memory serve for the rest of my life to enhance my dreams? It would have to, yes?
Let us imagine, then, that God and a sour travel guide fire off a gun to propel us in and out of the Louvre at full jog, remembering that Bernard Berenson, the great Italian Renaissance historian, warned his friends, year on year, to spend no more than an hour in any museum. Not even ninety minutes, mind you! Sixty! Beyond that, he warned, the eyes gum, the limbs collapse, the mind sleeps. Get out! he said.
With Berenson in full trot to arrive promptly and leave early, what confronts us at the Louvre?
Two roadblocks. The outer pyramid, the inner smile.
Unlike some Parisians who hated Pei’s crystal architecture sight unseen, I welcomed it. For it is the bright headstone on those best-of-all-possible-world treasures buried here: memories of obelisks, one seen on the way across the Place de la Concorde, plus the ghosts of Napoleon, Champollion, Denon, and three thousand Egyptian years. So Pei’s pyramid is a great lantern over a sandstorm Nile River past.
I descend to find …
The second roadblock, the smile that haunts until, with a sigh, you go to kowtow to The Mona Lisa, pretend adoration, and leave. Yes, yes. I know! Da Vinci lugged her on horseback to meet, create, and die with Francis I. But the phantasmal face of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks erases the smile.
Standing before her, I recall a story I wrote forty years ago in which future anarchists defile Da Vinci’s portrait, rip it apart. One piece is saved by a ten-year-old boy, who sneaks home at midnight. As the moon rises, he opens his clenched fist to find, safely buried there: the smile.
All that being true, I do not prolong my visit with Mona Lisa. Blasphemous, yes, but off I go.
Swiftly I pass Monet, Manet, Hals, Boucher, Seurat, even Fra Angelico. For I must rush to meet my true lifetime love!
Why this headlong flight from yesteryear’s painters and paintings?
Champollion and Denon call. I run, with children in my wake.
Why ignore the Louvre in its immensity to stare at Karnak, weep at Thebes?
Those very children, of course. Isn’t the problem of enticing the young getting them to even enter a gallery door? Guided, do they not sleepwalk and cry, “Are we there yet?”
If their destination is the mummies that we all love, grinning beneath their linen sheaths, yes.
For consider, most of us entering any museum, anywhere, enter to move in ignorance. We know not the pictures nor the names. But children?! Which means all of us. From early on we are immersed in Nile waters. When we see Tut photographed, we wave! We stuff ourselves with pyramid funerals, Sphinx profiles, pictographed sarcophagi—all that good stuff. By osmosis we grow into our tenth year ready for the Louvre catacombs where Thutmose and Nefertiti stay. Time later to rise from that dust-that-is-spice to half wake with Boucher and David. Now with the wisdom of children whose nightly dreams are cat and jackal gods, we obey the primal urge to lose ourselves in antiquities.
But first—dim the lights.
I have always fancied a museum lurked in after midnight. To stand in darkness, to pick out spectral shapes by candle or flash … ah, that’s the best! No stranger’s elbow stabbing your ribs, no docent mobs when you want to stray, wander, touch or even whisper to Ramses’ or Cleopatra’s friends. No civilization in all history could appreciate my midnight séances more than the Egyptians.
So as the museum night-lights extinguish, follow my tour of four thousand years and forty thousand dynastic artifacts. None brought here by Napoleon—his were long since seized for transport to British museums. Including the fabulously evocative Sèvres Egyptian dinne
r service that Napoleon presented to Josephine and which bored her, mysteriously. I have future plans to snatch it from London’s Apsley House to table it here as service for the waiting pharaohs in the hungry tombs.
If Napoleon, then, and his dinnerware are not here, very little abides of Denon, who accompanied Bonaparte. Champollion, who came later, accomplished more.
What is here would cargo a thousand Nile skiffs:
The bronze statue of Karomama, brought back from Egypt by Champollion, who then purchased the statue of Ramses II plus a hundred sarcophagi, two hundred sculptures in marble, and two thousand sculptures in bronze, the largest collection that exists outside of Egypt. Plus the crypt of Osiris with animal mummies and sarcophagi and the crypt of the Sphinx, containing a colossal Sphinx and two statues in relief representing King Ramses II adoring the god Horus, plus the meals and menus for pharaohs on their death-boat journeys.
Sixty minutes isn’t half enough for this Egyptian eternity.
Having swum the Nile past to arrive in the postimpressionist present, your children along with myself are perhaps now open to meeting Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Cézanne.
Time now to scout out the occasional Daumier, the almost forgotten Doré, and the not-often-enough-mentioned Grandville, if such can be searched for and found here in the endless caches and bins. Time now to refeather the wings of the Victory and fit imaginary arms to the Milo Venus. And then, why not? Go back to confront Mona Lisa to see if our sojourn with mummified cats and canopic jars stuffed with royal tripes has improved her disposition. Because of our trafficking with tombs, has her mouth shaped to a warmer smile? Perhaps.
I end my lightning tour as I began thirty-nine years ago when I circuited Paris to pause for a moment before this museum.
Today the view is the same but with the addition of the crystal pyramid behind me as celebratory cap to the buried wonders.
Three years ago at twilight, I stood gazing along the Tuileries, the Place de la Concorde, and on up to the Arc. With my camera I snapped three dozen photos in what I often describe as the David Lean hour, that golden time before night when that film director, waiting for inspired illumination, caught his subjects painted with illusory gold. For this view of Paris, I thank the raw fact that the outer galleries of the Louvre were left unfinished, leaving the panorama all the way to the Tour Eiffel to stun visitors like myself who arrive for ninety minutes but stay a lifetime.
