“Stop!” cried the old man.
Douglas pulled up and turned.
Mr. Sanderson leaned forward. “How do they feel?”
The boy looked down at his feet deep in the rivers, in the fields of wheat, in the
wind that already was rushing him out of the town. He looked up at the old man, his eyes
burning, his mouth moving, but no sound came out.
“Antelopes?” said the old man, looking from the boy’s face to his shoes.
“Gazelles?”
The boy thought about it, hesitated, and nodded a quick nod. Almost immediately
he vanished. He just spun about with a whisper and went off. The door stood empty.
The sound of the tennis shoes faded in the jungle heat.
Mr. Sanderson stood in the sun-blazed door, listening. From a long time ago,
when he dreamed as a boy, he remembered the sound. Beautiful creatures leaping under
the sky, gone through brush, under trees, away, and only the soft echo their running left
behind.
“Antelopes,” said Mr. Sanderson. “Gazelles.”
He bent to pick up the boy’s abandoned winter shoes, heavy with forgotten rains
and long-melted snows. Moving out of the blazing sun, walking softly, lightly, slowly,
he headed back toward civilization . . . .
Apparently this story(The Sound of Summer Running) was inspired by an incident on the bus. Ray Bradbury identifies the importance of ‘wanting’ in this story and makes the desire fresh and innocent. He also transforms the act of gaining what you desire into a reciprocal gift. I will come back to this idea shortly. However let us first see how Ray Bradbury remembers the event:
“I was on a bus going into Westwood a few years ago, and a young boy jumped on the bus, threw his money in the box, raced down the aisle, and threw himself into a seat across from me. And I looked at him, and I said, ‘My god, if I had his energy, I could write a poem every day, a story every week, a novel every month. What’s his secret?’ I looked down at his feet. He had the brightest pair of new fresh tennis shoes on his feet. And I said, oh, my god, I can remember when I was a kid, my father taking me downtown and buying me my first pair of new summer tennis shoes. I went home, and I wrote the short story.”
Look how Bradbury creates his story via association. He sees the boy board the bus, notices his energy and then finds the ‘reason’ for such vitality in the ‘fresh tennis shoes.’ Bradbury then recalls his own emotional connection to the resonant event of the new ‘summer tennis shoes’ and thus the story is discovered. I say discovered because Bradbury’s creative technique reminds me of Michelangelo’s famous description of his own art, where it is as if the artistic creation has already existed and is merely waiting for the artist to discover its hiding place. Hence his creation of the Sound of Summer running.’
”Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
The ending of the Summer of Running story is beautifully ambiguous. For is Douglas’ experience of the tennis shoes the same as that of the old man? Surely the old man imagines a jungle world and the young boy something nearer to home. Yet the prompting of the old man may transport the young boy into the world of gazelles and antelopes too. Their understanding seems reciprocal from the beginning and the old man accepts the terms of the young boy’s deal with him. The boy’s desire for the sneakers becomes a matter less of material exchange and more about a reciprocal gift, a ‘communion’ of the imagination.
If the boy’s magical ‘away’ is initially different to that of Mr Sanderson, then the boy has the capacity to imagine Mr Sanderson’s ‘away’ too. The very evocation of the words ‘antelopes’ and gazelles’ act like a Proustian conjuring trick as they re-evoke the freedom of a Proustian ‘lost time’. As the boy and Mr Sanderson wear the new sneakers they are anchored to a fresh sensory freedom which ignites their imagination. They become ‘lite’ as the name oft he shoes promises and this contrasts with the ‘heavy’ shoes of the present, where the burdening weffect of material reality is to supppress the imaginative freedom of wonder…linked in this story with the young boy.
Thus the old man is returned elegaically to a time and place when he was young, dreamy and full of imagination. ‘Civilization’ as the last word in the tale appears to be all tied up with convention and expediency. interestingly the boy’s father has no recognition oft he magical qualities of the new sneakers. He dwells very much in a more practical, prosaic reality.
Yet the old man, perhaps more contemplative of his approaching ‘exit’ from life, now delivers up the names of the free running animals as a promise and hope for something truly ‘away’ from the prosaic world.
Simply wonderful.
