Dandelion Wine is an amazing book about making the common things in life uncommon and about enjoying again with childlike wonder the world around us; if you have never read this book, you should do so within the next two weeks.
Bradbury captures with inviting imagery and memorable passion the simplicity and beauty of youth. Douglas Spaulding, the book’s main character, becomes Bradbury’s medium through which he can experience childhood over again, yet now through the eyes of aged wisdom. The book is more than just a story about a child growing up. It is a process of removing the callouses from a soul hardened by time and banal predictability; the renewal of wonderment.
One of the subplots of the book is the creation of a “happiness machine” which would allow the user to artificially experience any happiness; but the machine could only plant within the user an insatiable desire for what was not real. It could only demonstrate the wonders of what could not be had; and in so doing, it destroyed the true happiness-it’s one goal-that comes only from acceptance and indulgence in the everyday.
Bradbury also uses an amazing symbol for memories – wine; and not just any wine, dandelion wine. Dandelions, dreadfully common, often viewed as a nuisance, are pressed into wine which grows sweeter with time. Each summer of simplicity and commonplace is bottled into a delicious vintage of uncommon commonness that is then stored to be enjoyed in years to come.
The key that Bradbury gives for true happiness is contentment, but a higher contentment than simply sordid acceptance. The contentment that he pictures in Dandelion Wine is an antonym of complacency; the premise is that we must see the profound in the simple and find beauty in the ordinary.
