Sunday, March 10, 2013

Farenheit 451


Farenheit 451--
The temperature at which book paper catches fire, and burns...

This book was exactly what I needed right now. That's what I have to start by saying. I used to be a voracious reader, and here I'm going to have to use a quote from one of the characters in the book--

"I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score, the billion!"
-Fire Chief Beatty

I think that this blog post could very easily regress into a collection of quotes from the book, and I would still get across exactly what I want to say, because it's one of those books. Those books where you understand every sentence, not just in terms of what it's saying, but in terms of what it means, what it means to you, to your life, what it means to the story. The book brings up ideas that just ring so true, the ones that you want to spend forever thinking about and discussing, just to try to understand them better.

But my point was that ever since high school hit, I've changed, and I know I have. I don't read anymore, because I don't have the time to read. Oh yes, I have the time to watch TV shows and movies, to talk with my friends, to go on tumblr, but I simply don't have the time to read. Because it's not the actual reading that takes time; It's the thinking. A book is ideas, so many ideas, all bound up with glue and a cover, and when life is moving so fast, you don't want to think about ideas. You want to have things told to you, definitively. You want to solve for X and come out with a whole number to plug into the equation and have it make sense. But that's not what thinking is, not what reading is. It's trying to figure out what the X is, again and again, when, in reality, the X is nothing. The X is everything.

And this book made me realize that.

In fact,

This book made me feel guilty.

It's funny how this book had the power to do that to me. It took every single argument you could make against reading and sent it up in a mushroom cloud of flames. It told you THERE IS NO EXCUSE. And that's exactly what I needed to hear.

I suppose I should have said about five paragraphs ago what Farenheit 451 is actually about. I guess I'm not writing this as an informative post, or even as a review. I don't feel like it's my place to review a book like this. I just want to get my thoughts down, I need to, because I have so many. But the book, written by Ray Bradbury, takes place in a future, where "Books were for burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden."-back cover. The story follows Guy Montag, a firemen, but not in our sense of the word. Firemen started fires, making midnight runs to burn collections of books that were found in homes. Because it was illegal to own books, illegal to read them. But Guy meets a girl Clarisse, seventeen, and different. She's not like the other people he's surrounded with; she takes time to think, to appreciate the world. To touch, smell, hear, see all the things that others are whizzing by too fast for others to notice. And she introduces Guy to this world. She plants the seed of a different way of thinking. Clarisse disappears from the story soon after, and Guy hears she was hit by a car and died. In the movie version she appears again at the end, in reality not dead, but in the book she never appears again. But it doesn't matter. Clarisse was less of a character, more of a catalyst. She set the cogs turning, set the ball rolling. And so Guy starts wondering why he's burning. What if books should be read? This train of thought leads him to steal a book AND YOU KNOW I DONT EVEN WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE PLOT BECAUSE I DONT FEEL LIKE IT GOOGLE IT.
It was really good though...

But I think what was really...chilling, I suppose, was that this book was written in 1950. That's over half a century ago. And yet, it's like Ray Bradbury could see into the future. I mean, weren't televisions barely invented in that time? Yet it's like he knows what effects they'll have on the future population. People being glued to televisions, thinking of the characters in them like real people, the shows of practically no consistency but somehow riveting people to watch them. He seemed to already understand that books would fall out of favor, how people wouldn't want to think about them. And it's true; not a lot of people my age read anymore. But I wonder, would they if they read Farenheit 451? Would they if they were aware of their condition, aware of the excuses they make to themselves, aware of what the future could turn into? I think that they would.

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