As I mentioned in an earlier posting, Karli and I are taking a break in Palm Springs this week - well, Palm Desert, to be accurate, at a rental condo in a gated community, with easy access to a shared pool and hot tub. Generally my vacations tend to be migratory, to the point that I've gone on trips where I didn't sleep in the same bed twice, but this trip is intended to be more about relaxation than exploration. As such, I'm looking forward to spending some time with the written word over the course of the week.
After picking up our rental car, we've stopped off at Target to do some casual shopping and pick up some supplies. As we wander through the store, we stop at the book section, where Karli selects a Jodi Picoult book for poolside reading. To my surprise, there's a trade paperback copy of Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451 on the Sale shelf, which I instantly add to our basket.* There’s a kind of casual irony in purchasing this book here - one feels that in Bradbury’s future of outlawed books, Target would be the last place you would find any work of fiction, let alone this one.
Reading the book over the course of the day (it's a quick read at 158 pages, the bulk of this particular printing is made up of commentary) I'm impressed by the poetic brilliance of Bradbury's style, as always. I'd also forgotten the tragic feel of the novel. As per Thoreau, Fireman Guy Montag leads a life of quiet desperation, flat and colourless: isolated from his wife, apparently without friends, doubtful of the rightness of his vocation as a fireman who starts fires rather than stopping them, almost indifferent to the ongoing state of war that stands as a constant background.
Fahrenheit 451 is a conflict between two philosophies: thought and complacency. To Bradbury, the elimination of books is the elimination of thinking, and with the loss of thought, the end of dissent and freedom. All that is left is the shallow and trivial televised world that obsesses Montag's wife Mildred and her friends, and insulates them from anything that might make them question the status quo.
Regardless of whether or not this is a future that we might ever actually see, this book strikes very close to home for me.
Why? Because I would undoubtedly be one of the criminals caught with a hoard of illegal books, one of the people who ends up in jail after their library is reduced to charred ashes, swirling in the wind around the skeletal remains of their home. Or would I refuse to surrender, like the nameless woman who contemptuously stands her ground and dies with her books?
More likely, I might well be one of the quiet rebels who abandons society to live in the woods, becoming a sort of living edition of a memorized book. Imagine being the last copy of The Lord of the Rings...
- Sid
* Considering that I own between five and six thousand books, you might be surprised that I don't already own a copy of Fahrenheit 451, but there are a few classic science fiction novels that I read early in my fandom and never added to my library. For example, I don't own a copy of Brave New World, although it's probably time for a reread. In this case, when we returned to Vancouver, I ruefully discovered that I actually did own a copy of Fahrenheit 451, the 50th anniversary paperback. Now that I have that and the commemorative 60th edition, hopefully I can skip buying the 70th anniversary issue in 2023.
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