Farenheit
Farenheit 451 - the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns…
I’s funny about this book. The title is so familiar, when I bring it up most people say they remember reading it but a long time ago. High school, maybe college. They ponder for a bit trying to remember what it was about. That’s exactly what I did. It had this murky spot on my mental shelf in the sci-fi category among authors I mixed up such as Kurt Vonnegut and Ursula Le Guin.
But then one of my book groups chose it. And for the first time I realized what the title meant. Oh, I thought, its about burning books. Interesting. But this book is really about so much more. I was a little sad that Bradbury had to sensationalize the ending with an epic battle (why do so many stories require an epic battle? I’ll check into that and get back to you….)
But the book is not just about burning books. It’s about an imaginal world without books. And a few aspects of his world circa 1953 that were disturbingly prophetic. Like the little devices called seashells that people put into their ears to block out noise and listen to chosen audio. Today we’d call them earbuds. Or the walls within their homes on which played out dramas acted by people they called “the parlor family.”
Farenheit made me stop to consider if we weren’t allowed books, what would we loose? And then, for all of those things we would lose, what would replace them?
In the story, firefighters no longer extinguish fires, they instead start them, any place where books are found. The story’s book-burning protagonist tries to come to terms with one of his assignments as he discusses it with his wife. ‘You weren’t there, you didn’t see,’ he said to his wife. ‘There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.’
“It’s not just the woman that died,” said Montag. “Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books . And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before…It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life and then I come along in two minutes and boom! It’s all over.”
Most important, Bradbury shows us the three things that go missing in this society without books.
The potential for quality and texture of information to show us the details of life that we can’t see any other way.
“The more prose, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are.”
The ability to pause and digest the ideas presented.
“We have plenty of hours.” “Off-hours yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall televisor Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!”
The right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the first two.
I’m not convinced that this tendency to distraction is unique to the 20th or 21st centuries. But in Bradbury’s story, I heard some questions unique to our technological culture. What happens in relationships when we would rather watch people have experiences than participate in life’s experiences? What happens when we would rather listen to other people’s thoughts and ideas rather than form our own? What happens when thought and language is reduced to 120 character phrases and five second sound-bites?
It’s not about the books. It’s about the ideas.
When the books are burned, where do they go?