The poor man, Montag, has an awful life, but maybe everybody in the book does. (Everyone uses sleeping pills, at any rate.) Such is the truth in any dystopian novel though. This one particularly highlights the importance of every person being educated and loving learning, especially through books. Montag is a fireman, in a time when houses are fireproof. His job is to go burn those houses that have books inside them. This did not start as a government mandate though, the people gradually stopped using books and eventually turned against them. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns.
One day on the way home he meets his new neighbor, Clarise, who is the only happy person in the novel. She lives in a world her own and actually sees things around her and thinks. After they've known each other awhile, they have this exchange:
"Why is it," he said, some time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you. And because we know each other."
An older man in the community who grew up with books and still loves them describes the three things missing from the people in that day. Lack of these three things led to the demise of the printed word: quality books, the leisure to digest them, and the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two. During the discussion on those three points this gentleman says "Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and skepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra..." I love that quote. Music is so powerful, but it is also ephemeral. The truth cuts both ways.
Later when Montag has some time to slow down and think, "He saw the moon low in the sky now. The moon there, and the light of the moon caused by what? By the sun, of course, and what lights the sun? Its own fire. And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning. The sun and every clock on the earth. It all came together and became a single thing in his mind. After a long time... he knew why he must never burn again in his life. The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt! One of them had to stop burning. The sun wouldn't, certainly. So it looked as if it had to be Montag and the people he had worked with... The world was full of burning of all types and sizes." What do I burn? How do I burn? What things in my life do I need to alter to become, instead, one who does "the saving... the putting away... the keeping"?
At one point Montag leaves the city and finds a kind of fire he never knew: "That small motion, the white and red color, a strange fire because it meant a different thing to him.
It was not burning. It was warming.
... He hadn't known fire could look this way. He had never thought in his life that it could give as well as take. Even its smell was different."
There are several afterwards by the author in the book. He discusses censorship and other 'burning' of his own works, and shares his thoughts on digression, which I found interesting and will share here. "Digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton, or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer--he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail." This caused me no little reflection, and I am resolved to notice the use of digression more in my reading.
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