Fahrenheit 451

I've been meaning to read this book for awhile and I'm glad I did.

Ray Bradbury outlines a futuristic world where humanity's (or just America's) drive for pleasure and entertainment have brought about a world with no conflict of information. Arguably, he details a world where there is no information at all, just visual and actual delight in mindless droning and violence. In this world that seeks pleasure, no one is pleased. People lack meaningful connections. People lack meaning.

At one point in the novel, Montag--who is a "fireman," a person who sets fire to books and the conflicting viewpoints they contain--meets a man named Faber who was once a college professor. The professor outlines three things necessary for thinking to take place: quality, or texture of information; leisure, not for leisure for entertainment's sake, but leisure to digest the quality ideas; and "the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the two" (85). Montag yearns to think and to form connections in a society of people who don't ignore meaning.

As I've thought about my life, the parts that are most meaningful to me fall in one of these three areas. I enjoy receiving textured information--in books, in conversations with people, at church. I'm grateful for time to digest. This blog is the space I've made to digest books, and I'm grateful for the metacognitive nature of writing; when I am serious in my scripture study, that becomes a valuable time for me to knock out ideas. And I'm grateful for the right I have to carry out the ideas I feel to be right; I think the main reason I chose to become a mother was because I believed in a value system that encouraged that. And being a mother and wife is the most valuable thing I have in life.

When I end my art history classes, I tell the students that I don't care whether they remember that Abbot Suger created the Gothic style through pointed arches; I don't care if they remember that Trajan was called "Optimus Maximus." What I do hope for is that my students have practiced thinking about things and thinking in new ways. In the novel, Beatty--the defender of censored lifestyle--describes the "information" the society is fed:

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. They they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.

It's not memorizing data that's important, it's the digesting information that helps people to become better.

More thoughts--

When Faber is describing the quality of information that can be found anywhere, but particularly in books, he explains:

Do you know why books such as [the Bible] 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 glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. [...] So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.

I guess I just think that's beautiful. But the idea continues that texture is irrespective of truth, a value that must be sifted out in the digesting of that texture. And then my mind remembered a quote from my favorite play Inherit the Wind that explains why that texture should not be feared. Rachel has just seen her fiance Bert put on trial for teaching Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species in the southern Bible belt. Thinking is on trial, too, and Rachel declares her own verdict:

You see, I haven't really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think--so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies, too! (pointing to [The Origin of the Species]) Maybe what Mr. Darwin wrote is bad. I don't know. Bad or good, it doesn't make any difference. The ideas have to come out--like children. Some of 'em healthy as a bean plant, some sickly. I think the sickly ideas die mostly, don't you, Bert?

I'm grateful for books and for the variety of ideas I encounter through them. I'm grateful for the opportunity to digest ideas and sift out what I know to be true in them. And I'm grateful to live in a society that allows me to act on what I feel to be good.