Day 376: Something Wicked + Caruso CD 1

WickedChapter Three touches on what I mentioned yesterday – the aspect of age…specifically the wistfulness of old age looking back on youth.

WATCHING THE boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.

Look! he thought. Will runs because running is its own excuse. Jim runs because something’s up ahead of him.

Yet, strangely, they do run together.

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (p. 17). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The chapter ends, as it began – with Charles Holloway pining for lost youth. In this scene, he sits in the bar, about to enjoy his one drink of the day. The bartender asks, “Have a drink?”

“I don’t need it,” said Halloway. “But someone inside me does.”

“Who?”

The boy I once was, thought Halloway, who runs like the leaves down the sidewalk autumn nights. But he couldn’t say that.

So he drank, eyes shut, listening to hear if that thing inside turned over again, rustling in the deep bons that were stacked for burning but never burned.

Bradbury, Ray (2013-04-23). Something Wicked This Way Comes (Greentown) (p. 19). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Brilliant.

And so is Caruso.

Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes takes place somewhere long ago – in the 1950s, maybe. Or 1940s. Perhaps even around the turn of the century. I”m not sure its exact setting in time is ever established. Just back when boys were like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

So listening to Caruso (from the early 1900s) is fitting music for this story.

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