The temperature at which book-paper burns…
I have read many many unsettling books in my time. Most of the classics are – in their own way – unsettling. Even Peter Pan in its original form is terribly bittersweet and sad; the list of amazingly unsettling books is long in my mind Animal Farm (“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” ) 1984 (she betrayed him of course, she had to…it was inevitable), Brave New World (“Can you imagine anything as disgusting as the idea of a ‘parent’), Lord of the Flies (Piggy…glasses…some things even I block out), and of course pretty much anything by Stienbeck…
I’ve even slogged my way through the original Malleus Malificarum…the ‘hammer of the witches’ that brought so many women to their deaths. That one hit the bedroom wall a few times before I finally managed to finish it.
But I’ve never read a book as frightening as Fahrenheit 451…
Because of all those dystopian futures, this one could happen. Even more so than 1984 (which I could never actually get through), with its mind control and its big brother…this could happen, because of political correctness, and our hyper-sensitivity and our constant gnawing need for instant and constant contentment…the terrifying thing about the world Bradbury portrays – is that it was brought about through the sheer laziness and undying selfishness of humanity, not because anyone was forced to, but because no one stood up to say ‘NO!’ for fear of ‘offending’ someone else…
And ‘intellectual’ became the swearword it always deserved to be.
We can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy. Isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? that’s all we live for right? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of those.
Coloured people don’t like ‘Little Black Sambo’. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity. Peace. Take your fight outside, or better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minute after death a man is a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.
Terrifying. Terrifying and so perilously close to being true. You don’t like something? Kill it, forbid it, get rid of it. In our desire to make everyone equal, might we not just as easily skew the other way? When everyone is special, no one is.
The firemen are rarely necessary anymore, the public stopped reading of its own accord. No one wants to be rebels anymore
The thought makes me ill, and I tell myself it’s not possible, it’s fiction, that’s all, just fiction. But then I think of e-readers, and internet and computers and people being so constantly plugged in, I think of hi-def TV, and Bluetooth and holographic concerts, earbuds and smartglasses and movies that don’t even have real actors in them anymore…
And I turn the page, and think please …please just save my libraries…or let me become one of those people that hordes forbidden books in her attic, and strikes the first match that she may die with the parchment when the fireman comes…