The room's starting to spin real fast

I have always believed that Life itself is more than fantastic. Therefore, most of these stories simply illustrate how fantastic life is. Life, to the believer OR the agnostic, is a pretty wonderful affair. I mean wonderful in the sense of true wonder, awful in the sense of awe, stressing the IM in impossible. It is truly a miracle that we are here at all, to sleep, to rise, to down quick breakfasts and run for trains and be on time or late, as Fate decides.

A child, realizing this, finds something magnificent in the whorls on his fingertips. As adults we soon transfer our attentions from our hands to our bodies to other people's bodies and circumstances and sooner or later we fall in love and THAT is a pretty strange business, too, another wonderful, awful, sometimes unbelievable business. But no matter how old we get there should always be that sense of living on the margin of impossibility. Hence, this book, in which many people discover the margin, or the precipice, or whatever you, personally, wish to call it. Some people are frightened by it, some are elated, but I believe the sense of the impossible can be used to sharpen our senses in what we are doing and where, if anywhere, we are going. We have all had moments such as The First Day I Discovered I Was Really Alive, at the age of ten. Or The First Day I Finally Realized That Someday I Must Die, at the age of fifteen. We have all walked in meadows on certain afternoons and suddenly been so keenly aware of living that we have felt a very real and deep gratitude for this chance to live. We have seen sunsets so beautiful that there is no talking of them, caused by a million interactions of events in the atmosphere, in the light, in the dust particles, and in the hidden theatre of the mind. We have all felt ourselves participants of a precious privilege given to us by God, of what ever shape or size you prefer, on the best birthday of all, the day each of us was born.

True, the greater part of life is a real and nasty business, with more failures than successes, more illness than health. Many of us quit early and threaten to drop out of the game. But give us another afternoon in a field, or a certain rain in the air outside the office window, or an hour of night when we wake to find the house asleep in moonlight, surrounded by our families, and we are set to go on again. An occasional breather, a refresher, a bit of luck, a happy meeting, can make us cling once more to this soiled small bit of existence with a ferocity that borders on and surpasses insanity. Gripe as we may, criticize as we must, when the hour comes to leave the stage, when our particular scene ends and the curtain is dropping, most of us regret that we can't stay on for at least another act.

-Ray Bradbury