WITH FRESH EYES

Every time I reread a book I first encountered in high school, it becomes an entirely new book with adult eyes.

I’ve read this book a number of times now as an adult, but this time around, I found myself struck by something new nonetheless: all the nature imagery. The deer staring at Montag in the countryside of course, but also books being described as like birds, and the reference to Antaeus, and the country night which “rested and slept him” though he did not sleep, and the men holding “to the earth as children hold to familiar things” in the wake of the bombing (136, 154). In other words, “in the middle of the strangeness, a familiarity” (138). I couldn’t help but think that nature perhaps takes on a similar role as books do, as an undeniable (even, gentler) reminder of who we are. Perhaps ultimately nature acts as another invitation back to our animal natures, and thus our humanity.

REFLECTIONS (WARNING: SPOILERS!)

As far as condemnations of society goes, Fahrenheit 451 is a particularly brutal one.

Certainly the specifics of its world are meant to address concerns from the time of publication (1953), and a few details do seem dated and more easily dismissed. Many parts still hit a bit too close to home however, even today:

• The “family” in the oversized tv distracting Mildred from her own thoughts to such an extent that she has become split apart, the self deep inside “so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met” (49).
• The noise of advertising (Denham’s Dentrifice!) drowning out thought (75).
• Winston Noble vs. Hubert Hoag in the recent election bringing to mind Noam Chomsky’s famous proclamation: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.“
• Clarisse’s dismantlement of the educational system (“[T]hey just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us standing there for four more hours of film-teacher”) might be one you agree or disagree with, but as a teacher it seems worth a mention (27).

Most of the characters, flattened though they are, are still human after all and not unaware of the issues surrounding them– though, like Mildred, it seems most bury it deep within. “Not enough hurt in the world, you got to tease people with stuff like that!” ejects Mrs. Bowles after Montag reads the poem (97). To say nothing of the mirror image of Mildred’s face (at least as Montag imagines it) briefly recognizing her own self as a stranger before the hotel collapses around her (152-3). We’re all going to die, in other words, so we might as well get some actual living in first.

More troubling for me though is the suggestion that there is no real solution for a society this far gone. No, not even books. Faber, the closest thing to a voice of reason, says as much a number of times. Without the foundation of self and critical thought, books can do no more for us and, as Beatty says, “we come away lost” (59). “Maybe books can pull us out of the cave,” hopes Montag (Plato’s cave that is), but even with books, the ideas may be just shadows on the wall, references to a feeling or thought too foreign to experience in the flesh. The world of Fahrenheit 451 is the allegory of the cave brought to life.

Yet, books have their part. Beautiful words, it seems, come to us when we have most need for them. After the bomb strikes, part of Ecclesiastes rises to the front of Montag’s brain, complete again. It is words from Revelation he wishes to offer when the troubled men reach the city at the end of the book. From the Wasteland (“his voice went out across the desert,” we are told as he begins to read “Dover Beach” to Mrs. Bowles and the others), comes a faint promise of something more Edenic (96). Books give voice to the wisdom and solace we may need.

Of course, to call the ending a “fresh start” would be to grossly omit how it comes about. Ray Bradbury sets fire to his imagined society, literally. Deus ex machina indeed. Did, in a way, the very thing we judge Beatty for some fifty pages earlier when he praises fire because “It destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it” (109). Could there though have been any other way? Most characters we care about are already dead (Clarisse) or safely away (Faber), we are reassured, and after all, there is a “time to be born, and a time to die.” Montag IS the book of Ecclesiastes.

In a dystopia of these proportions who is to say, but I certainly hope in our world, for all its similarities, there is an easier way. I’m not sure I know what that way is, but I think a clue comes when Faber begs Montag (not unlike Mrs. Bowles does shortly after) not to make him feel any more (84). Feeling isn’t enjoyable, not like this, but from feeling comes courage. Ecclesiastes says something similar: “A sad face is good for the heart” (7:3).

To numb is to hide. Is a weapon as effective as the Hound’s dripping silver needle. But by feeling, we live. We care. From caring comes action, and just reread Granger’s Grandfather speech if you need a reminder of Bradbury’s feelings about how action makes a person alive. From caring too comes awareness and a full expression of self. We need books, yes, but what any world needs even more is us. Us, not a mere shadow of who we are playing on the cave wall.

BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. If you could share one scene from the book with someone to convince them to read it (or to skip it), what would it be?
2. Sum the book up in five words exactly.
3. Cast your dream movie adaptation.
4. What happens ten years after the last page?
5. Was there any other way to solve the problems of this society?
6. What do you take away from the book as a message for your life or your world?
7. Underrated or overrated?