Рэй Брэдбери - Yestermorrow - Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

Let us call it the Hearthing Place. It could be built as an adjunct to the old city hall or as a tower next to a church. Or, excuse our fiery dust, an insurance tower, why not, that insured the future? What better insurance is there than the rocket? What insuring? The health of man. His will. Founded on what? The imagination of man. His dreams. With what in escrow, with what as down payment? The whole history of his planning and thinking and dreaming and making with his hands and night visions and noon accomplishments.

Think how it might be for coming generations to go to bed and, falling into slumber, hear the great tower proclaim futures, even as the old bell tower in the Civil War town hall proclaimed the present with a feel of the Gothic and somehow graveyard past. The tolling of the funeral bell of lost or won wars then. The sound of the rockets moving up in our tower now and forever. A counting up instead of a counting down. A soft voice, not a loud one, whispering the hour that promises tomorrow and survival. And at midnight, if you’re awake, looking out, the dome of the tower, in sudden full firefalls of arrival, as Man reaches and enters the threshold of the universe. All the stars in fireworks there, pulsing, for a brief interval as night turns on its mighty cosmic heel and motions toward a promise of dawn.

What a tower. What a promise. What an insured future.

Architecture that imagines more than itself—that imagines man in order to have even more imagined.

The stuff of tomorrows has always been boys, girls, men, women, projecting images of their days on the ceilings of their bedrooms in the hour before sleep.

Those images we must pluck down and erector-set in our cities. Let the tower be the rocket. Let the rocket show us not north, nor east, nor west, nor south by southwest but— up. Let all the old gods from Olympus visit there to be visited. If you want to ride up and speak with them, late at night, let them be there, in soft converse, for children to question, and in an alcove half up through Time , on the way to Cosmos, let it be possible to step off the escalator and stand watching and hearing Apollo and Aphrodite and Hermes and all the rest telling our visions and pointing in yet further directions.

Architectures that imagine, architectures that promise, architectures that more than stand, architectures that dream. Architectures that tell us what we can be, what our destiny is. The old structures only promised impossible heavens in death. Let the new ones promise possible life for all the generations to come, when we have knocked death ten times over and turned time inside out, and made it beyond the Moon, beyond Mars, to hearthing places and seedbeds we cannot now imagine, far out beyond the reach of that Gothic death that sounds with every marrow-chilling tone of that old city tower.

Buildings with fire in them, with energy, with blood, and all those dear night-thrown visions on dusky ceilings and two-in-the-morning (oh God, I hope I can— !) walls.

Building surprise back into a large city is a matter of erasing blank facades, inserting the small shop back where it once was, on streets that do not refuse us or turn us off, but promise us renewal. Small towns, because of their size, are harder problems. Surprise must come from what little we can do with a minimal amount of architecture and a maximum number of people flowing in surprises around and amongst each other. Big cities depend on mixtures of buildings and humans, small towns must survive mainly with person colliding with person in the most amiable of collisions.

So there you have it. The beginning, most certainly not the middle or the end, of my thinking beyond 1984. That 1984 I hate because it is an intellectual fraud and never had a chance of arriving in a jump-shout-yell culture of ideas such as our own. And on toward the 2001 I truly and completely and resolutely believe in, because it is the chance for us to remake ourselves that is irresistible.

We will do everything, we will solve everything, we will build everything that needs doing, solving, and building during the next few years.

How come? Why the positive bias? Why the inclination toward optimism? Because optimism has only meant one thing to me—the chance to behave optimally. Hip-deep, that is, in our genetics, we behave up to the limit of our blood and brains.

We have done it before. We have done it often.

This is a new war. The best. The war to save our skins, our social selves, the fun of living, to build instead of destroy, to survive rather than be bored to death. To be once more the children of a wide-ranging, imaginative and vital culture, rather than the slaves of network television.

What greater challenge is there?

Forward!

You can’t get there from here.

…or…

If you’re not careful, Arriving’s a bore.

Being on a Journey is the Way and the Life, and being Lost is Best of All!

So the first thing we are, when we enter the First Maze is:

Lost.

Beautifully lost, that is, in something like the alleys of Paris, the vast spiderweb risings and fallings of ways and byways in the Casbah…

A touch of London waterfront, with fog here…

A remembrance of Shanghai or Hong Kong there…

The Tivoli just beyond…

And beyond that, a twist to find Dublin, a turn to discover Venice, a roundabout to Rome, upstairs to Vienna, downstairs to Flamenco Madrid caverns…

What we have here, of course, is a multiplicity, a plethora, a maze of restaurants, large and small, foreign and domestic, where the hot dog blends with the pizza, which blends with the falafel, which wanders over into the strudel and the cream bun, the coffee and aperitif outdoor cafe. All the textures, colors, smells we can borrow from every street, cornucopia alleyway, every burrow and lost corner of Piccadilly or Montmartre, Florence or downtown Barcelona, let us borrow, let us build, let us light. The overall flavor in the air might well be the smell of coffee being roasted somewhere in the deeps of New Orleans—but the scent reaches us here. Our noses should lead us even before our eyes see the Maze and can hardly wait to be lost.

Because the maze of restaurants, twining in and out of history, should circle and re-circle itself so that it might take three or four visits before you figure out where everything is. In the meantime you are delightfully blundering into sitdown cafes, stand-up hot dog stands, lounge-around beer halls, take-your-time-forever French restaurants, instant-ice billets. The overall smell may be coffee, but the overall sound is tasting, chewing, swallowing. It is a Sea of Eats.