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Fahrenheit
451
By
Ray Bradbury, Ballantine Books, 1989, 179 pages “So
now do you see why books are hated and feared?
They show the pores in the face of life.
The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless,
expressionless.”1 Imagine, if you can, a totalitarian, hedonistic society that bans all books. Since I am an avid reader, I can’t. I can’t envision a time when I would not be able to relax with a good book to make me think. And I especially cannot imagine a world where I do not have the Bible available for me to read. Not only can I not imagine having a good book to read, but neither can I imagine the world of sameness depicted by Bradbury in this classic from 1951, entitled Fahrenheit 451 because that is the temperature at which books combust. Why have books been banned and sought out and burned by firemen if found? Not because of evil within the books, but so that people will not think for themselves. Using electronic entertainment and drugs, the totalitarian government has been successful in making the people complacent. After all, books have conflicting ideas, so who can know which book to believe? And the thinking that often accompanies reading of books sometimes can make one feel—and who wants to feel painful emotions? Most of the people in this society where suicide and murder are common and happiness is rare just dumbly follow government orders. Montag, a fireman, enjoys his job of burning houses and books¾“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ‘em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”2 However, when 17 year-old Clarisse McClellan and her family move next door, Clarisse’s conversations of flowers and grass and the man in the moon cause Montag to begin thinking about his society and whether or not people are happy¾whether or not he is happy. Montag is still pondering these questions when he and his fellow firemen burn a house where books have been found; the old lady in the house refuses to leave, but instead stays to burn with her books. Now Montag thinks seriously about the power of the written word. What in these books cause people to be willing to die for them? Beatty,
the fire chief, explains life to Montag: “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. ….We must all be alike. Not
everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone
made equal. Each man the image
of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them
cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.
Burn it. Take the shot from
the weapon. Breach man’s mind.”3 Yet Montag is unconvinced and begins to take actions that he would have considered bizarre only a week earlier. With the help of an old professor named Faber, Montag manages to come to a decision about the role of books and his responsibility concerning them. Faber tells him, “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”4 Escaping from the city where his life is now in danger, Montag joins with the Book People, thousands of people who have escaped the city, not with written books, but with the books in their memories. “We’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise…and when the war’s over, someday, some year, the books can be written again.”5 Montag and the reader feel hope that the irrepressible spirit of mankind will endure in spite of oppression. These
words spoken by one of the Book People to Montag are some of the most memorable: “Everyone
must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather says.
A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of
shoes made. Or a garden
planted...when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you
planted, you’re there. It
doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the
way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take
your hands away. The difference
between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he
said. The lawn cutter might just as
well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”6 This
makes me wonder exactly what I am leaving behind. Like Montag, I am now asking myself some questions.
Am I really touching someone, or have I just cut the grass?
Do I have enough of the Word of God stored in my brain and heart to
recall if ever it is unavailable to me? Do
I really love the Word of God, giving
myself to the study of the most powerful and important book in the world?
Or do I take this privilege lightly and spend more of my time on temporal
things? I am sometimes embarrassed
at my answers and know that I must no longer take for granted the privilege of
reading and, yes, memorizing the
scriptures. After all, even though
Bibles are available to all of us, many times we do not have them in our hands
when we need to give an answer to someone about what the Bible says. What we store in our brains and heart really is important. © 2001, Shirley McDonald --------- Shirley McDonald attends the First United Pentecostal Church in Denham Springs, Louisiana. A high school librarian, she is extremely thankful to be living in a country that does not burn books. She hopes to store more of the Word of God in her brain while it still can retain (some) information. 1
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