Fahrenheit 451

I never consider it too late to read the book even if I’ve already watched the flick and I’m glad. I would have missed out on Harry Potter, the first book at least. I would also have never known the work of Ray Bradbury. A friend, who always has really great recommendations and then actually lends me the books, lent me the movie after a rousing conversation about CleanFlicks and other censorship offenses. It was a natural leap. Once I dutifully enjoyed the movie, I was given the book.

Within the confines of Montag’s mind I felt disturbed by upheaval, I felt the coming revolution. He carries on a stream of thought that at first seems unnecessary. I thought, we all think those things… Until it becomes apparent that, no, not in his world. Not in this future where people have not only been taught not to think but where the non-instruction is no longer needed. People have become shells and Montag is becoming more. Painfully, at first, and slowly, he begins to think for himself.
This is exactly the sort of story that gets my fire up. On any given day you can mention a little flick called, “Idiocracy,” and I get up on my soapbox and carry on about it. How can people think it was funny? How is it not classed as a premonitory documentary? I’ve felt this way about the world for years. Perhaps most of my life. That it seems people are all sleeping, or blind, willfully so. Why don’t they care about the distance we are manufacturing between each other? Why don’t they care about the things they see? Clarisse McClellan says:

“Bet I know something else you don’t. There’s dew on the grass in the morning.”
He suddenly couldn’t remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable.
“And if you look”—she nodded at the sky—”there’s a man in the moon.”
He hadn’t looked for a long time.

She can be seen as several notes from the author. As a symbol of our collective spirit, in this future hobbled and ill-fated; as catalyst and then as an embodiment of the changes in Montag, bringing about the revolution to her way of loving life; or as the seed of that revolution in every person, in her still young and vital, not yet smothered by convenience, convention, and fear. People fear feeling and thinking. You can see it in their body language. You can hear it in the choking sound behind an awkward laugh. When you ask, a non sequitor, “Are you happy?” or “But, how do you really feel?” It amounts to the same thing. Fear, denial, autopilot. Not all people, though not only a handful, either.

This novel doesn’t leave you with a happy ending; it doesn’t leave you hopeless. It doesn't leave you; it lingers. I finished reading, dropped the book, and fell right to sleep. As I was waking, I was gathering books in my arms, reciting every word I had ever read, all of them neatly ordered into thoughts and devices, plots and dénouements. I was desperate to save them, to prove that they lived. It was nearly a nightmare. The last words I began to recite were my own but they wouldn’t come. They were fading, not burning. There was no illumination and my mind was going dark.

I worry about the state of my species. I worry that there are many more people in this country who can break down the latest season of Gossip Girl than who can explain how electricity allows them to turn on their television sets. This worries me. But the fact that many of my friends, my mother, and I worry about it, the fact that Ray Bradbury did in 1950 and probably still worries about it… Just the fact that we are thinking about it and writing about it makes me feel better despite the nightmare, not so alone in my own fear and more and more confident that the idiocracy isn’t in our future.

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Title: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Page count: 176, including Afterword and Coda
Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.

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