Fair warning: This is a language-arts lovers type of post. Stay with me!
If nothing else, age can give us perspective.
I don’t remember when I first read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury—I was probably 15 or 16, I suppose—but I do remember that the title is the temperature at which the ‘firemen’ burn the books. When I think back to my first take on the book I can recall that it gave me pause, that it made me think, but it wasn’t one of those books that really moved me, one that I thought about for days after I turned the last page, like Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth or John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
So this summer, when my son was reading the old classic about men and fire and books, I picked it up and re-read it myself.
This time, I won’t forget it. Age and life experience, parenting and deliberately choosing, as much as possible, the life I live—all of these things conspired to change my experience in re-reading these words. This time, I’ll add it to my list of books that keep me thinking.
As I read the descriptions of Guy Montag’s wife, Mildrid, sitting in her parlor, “watching” the 3 wall-sized TV screens that surrounded her, I wondered how close we might come to that reality. The characters in the book wear earbuds into which the drivel of the on-screen characters ceaselessly fills their heads.
In the book, as in life, it’s not the watching of TV that’s inherently bad; it’s what the excessive viewing of insipid productions does to the lives of the individuals and ultimately to the society as a whole.
In essence, people became so consumed with themselves—so inward focused and selfish—that they ceased to have any concern or even thought, really, of society at large. “Parlor parties,” where group of women get together and watch the walls for hours replaces meaningful discussion of any sort. Guy’s wife becomes so mindless that she accidentally overdoses on sleeping pills, and yet three walls of screens are not enough for her. “How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in?” she asks. Responding to the fact that such a device costs one-third of Guy’s yearly pay, she snips, “It’s only two thousand dollars…And I should think you’d consider me sometimes.” Her world consist of watching people named Bob and Ruth and Helen on these vast screens and when Guy asks her what the “play is about,” it isn’t surprising that she replies, “I just told you. There are these people named Bob and Ruth and Helen.” That’s it. That’s all she knows. Who needs a plot, I suppose when you have Bob and Ruth and Helen amusing you until, as Mildred later exclaims, they become your “family.
As Guy begins to think, as he dares to question his job, to ponder what once was and how and why society sunk to this nadir of intellectualism. His boss Beatty explains it, in part, like this:
“But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet…was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for that past five centuries or more.”
“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything…”
“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities…The people in the book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!…Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca…No wonder books stopped selling the critics said.”…There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God…”
It disturbs me to that it’s not so far-fetched to imagine a world in which we are more caught up in the affairs of the Jersey Shore than the affairs of the world. Understanding the nuances of Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan can make the most interested poli-sci students weary. Parents are exhausted. Men and women are pre-occupied. When we collectively fall into our favorite chairs at the end of the evening, it’s far easier to just know that those countries are there, to know there’s conflict, and to let the government worry about it so we can grab the remote and get on with the business of catching up with our favorite show.
And so, Fahrenheit 451 has my attention. This book, written in 1953, has me thinking. And wondering. And thinking some more.
What has you thinking these days?
