242. Fahrenheight 451
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by: Marianne Boeke
Author: Ray Bradbury
Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia
175 pages, published October 1953
Reading Format: Audio Book on Hoopla
Summary
Ray Bradbury’s science fiction classic Fahrenheight 451 is set in a dystopian future where books are verboten because the powers that be deem them to make people unhappy. The main character is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to burn books. After a few interactions with a teenage neighbor named Clarice, Guy comes to realize that something is missing in his life. As begins to defy society’s rules by keeping books, he becomes a hunted man.
Quotes
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. 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. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go 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.”
“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”
“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”
“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They’re Caeser’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal.” Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”
“It doesn’t matter what you do…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.”
“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
My Take
I first read Fahrenheight 451 in high school. I enjoyed it then, but think I liked it even better on the second reading more than 35 years later. As an avid reader, it is hard for me to imagine a world without books. They enrich my life deeply and make me think about ideas in whole new ways. That is the point Bradbury is trying to make. Without exposure to ideas both old and new (with books as the premier transmission form), we are destined for a life of mediocrity and banality.
