Photograph by Raymond Gehman

 

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In the May/June issue, author Ray Bradbury, renowned for his short stories, poetry, and screen-works, recalls instances of wonderfully diverse weather during his European travels. Here, an excerpt.

With the rain banging on my face, I yanked my cap down and thought: Why am I doing this?

Because.

Which is the best reason for writer to go a-journeying.

Photograph by Joel Sartore

I walked through the rain and then strode through the rain and the more I walked the more I developed an appetite for weather. The rain, banging my shoulders, turned me this way, that, around, and back in an exhilaration so wild I laughed at my own lunacy. Stop! I thought. Buy a brandy. Go to bed. No, no! Where’s the bust of Yeats, the theater, the Liffey Bridge? I went.

To find what? Beggars in front of hotels large and small, hands up, palming the rain for coins. An old woman strumming a harp half out of the pour, pringling her fingers through harp strings and beaded curtains of rain, with music between. Then a swift run past pubs where sheepfolds of men, glued close by taunts and jibes, ignored the drench, remembered their wives, and begged another round, and thence to the Gaiety Theatre porch, where a tinker of taffy broke it with a silver hammer, minding the exit, for if the play were shopworn, some ticket holders might escape between scenes to buy sweets heading home, and thence on to the Shelbourne Hotel, where a shawl-wrapped woman thrust forth a swaddling babe asking God and the hotel tenants to see his despair, his unwiped nose, buy him a bun and her: warm gin.