as I write this, the sky is weeping. little-big droplets of water cascade down the shut windowpanes, the odoriferous soil sets my senses in motion, and the monotonous drip-drops of the teasing rain invite the child in me to play, and jump, and sing with them. this moment, this minute, is the perfect time for my thoughts about fahrenheit 451 to coagulate. nature is about balance, isn’t it? with water comes fire.
it really was a pleasure to burn. even more so, to see things burn. houses in blaze. books in blaze. seesawing display of bright red-blackish flames devouring everything on the way. fragments of wood falling off the temporary mound of hell on earth. they all exhibit the idea of fun. but fun, more or less, pertains to playfulness and lack of seriousness, right? with this, I’d like to think about danger. almost every paragraph in the book poses/is verging into danger/something out of the ordinary (to be more subtle). “fahrenheit 451…the temperature at which books burn.”, danger, isn’t it?
“The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt.”
it is also apparent that destruction plays a big role as one of the motifs. I, myself, am undeniably fascinated with destruction. in this book, you are thrown into an on-going war (but not entirely dwelled into by bradbury); censorship dictating ruination of books, family units, search for profound knowledge, lives, and souls; highly-advanced technology in the form of The Mechanical Hound, which almost so instantly tracks wanted people via their scents; and an individual’s own submission to self-annihilation, suicide. a world in gray with streaks of bright-red orange and flaming fuschia, is how I like to visualize the setting.
fahrenheit 451 takes place in a futuristic, hedonistic, anti-intellectual society, where parlors project the immediate information that everyone takes in whether they strictly accept it or not. they are like the televisions in our day and age. the members of the society were fed with loads of contradicting/complementing ideas as they passively swallow them in without any whimper, disgust, nod of agreement ---no reaction at all. bradbury, himself, said that the book touches on the alienation of people by media. a very interesting subject for me all throughout my uni years as it became a constant debatable subject in my social science and art studies classes.
I don’t want to go into the summary. useless since one should read it otherwise. so obviously, I highly recommend this masterpiece of mr. ray bradbury. especially so, if and when you think that we are in a society where the media, the television and such rots the mind instead of daring it to prove its worth beyond what’s expected of it.
I’d like to end this post with the importance of books, which I have enthusiastically affixed to my mind for the bookworm within me,
“Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the grass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”(I wish to have written down every paragraph that I underlined for their beauty and essentiality. I felt my hands dripping and my ass sagging against the cushy mattress. I am inefficient.)
