Reposted by Dylan™
This is the most remarkable story Ray Bradbury ever shared with me. He told it to me late one night, sitting in his den of antiquities and mementos. Take five minutes to read this. It’s pure magic.
#Writing #Living #Creativity #RayBradbury #BookSky
!["[those free trade agree]ments are a case in point. It's because of them that the people India and Africa, all colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are."
Churchill's neck reddened and he crouched forward.
"Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favored position among the British Dominions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England's ministers."
"You see." said Father, slowly, "it is along in here some-where that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me.
"I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward contries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can't be done, obviously by 18th century methods. Now--"
"Who's talking 18th century methods?"
"Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation--by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community."
Note: these are excerpts from pages 36 and 37 of As He Saw It, written by FDR's son Elliot Roosevelt, in 1946. A very important book. Elliot was present for these events, recalling verbatim what was said with help from the official records. It was written and released in 1946 to protest and raise the alarm over the betrayal of the FDR administration's post war vision, with a forward supporting this view from the great Eleanor Roosevelt. read it.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:yhd4zuq7akup5uum7mveoozw/bafkreifisnyu4uckuoojpehqabkk7qpkzwwvak4a3wv33v5nhclyzlflcq)
![THE RAFT-BUILDERS
[by Lord Dunsany]
All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.
They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.
See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things—small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings—and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.
For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.
Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.
There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:utdci2ewhpqzfl6uukt4kdkc/bafkreifikhyonuxtvq335lsvoml4gbqzng6yxvposhuz6a7i7rae5nz3zy)
![[quoting a tweet from isabelunraveled in which she rails against depressing books that get branded as “great writing”]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hppum4l25hcczzffastsicpq/bafkreidzblpxefncqr2c73v7myen325wvtk767i7rw4zcc32c3hj4gzv5a)
