Fahrenheit 451

I first ran into this Ray Bradbury novel when I was in high school—a very long time ago. Recently, when I was buying a graduation gift for a granddaughter, I was browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble and saw a 60th anniversary edition on the shelf. Just had to get it. (I think I have an older paperback copy somewhere, but this book seemed to deserve my time.)

The title of the book refers to the temperature at which book paper bursts into flame. The book is set in some distant future when all the houses are fireproof and the government wants to control everything people think, so one of the best strategies is to burn books. Firemen (the book’s central character is a fireman.) no longer have water in the tanks of their fire trucks. They have kerosene. And their job, if anyone is suspected of owning books, is to go to the home of the offender and burn everything in sight.

I remember reading this as a teenager and never really recovering from the vision of the terrible emptiness of the culture. The only things to really do in their world are to watch TV, drive really fast, and look at 3-D porn. The book was published in 1953, when the government’s “Red Scare” meant that anyone whose thinking was not exactly identical to the official standard was likely to suffer.

Seventy-three years have not blunted the book; if anything, it has become sharper and more relevant. Some of the predictions have become frighteningly normal: everyone now has earbuds, room-size interactive television is available, and various recreational drugs are now legal. Chilling. To this day, I cannot really watch TV.

I would call the book educational in the same sense that a good university education deserves that name. As you read, you keep running into people and events that pull you outside yourself. An old lady chooses to burn with her house and quotes Bishops Latimer and Ridley, who were burned at the stake in 1555: “Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” The fireman burns Dante and Swift and Marcus Aurelius. The predictions of a world in the future (OUR future) are spot-on. We live in a time when, increasingly, calling someone an “intellectual” is an insult, and even on the government level, if a person is an expert, that’s an excellent reason to ignore what they have to say. That’s the world of Fahrenheit 451.

I need this book. And in a sense, it pretty much defines why I am what I am and do what I do.