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madali
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« on: July 28, 2011, 01:13:PM » |
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Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953)
"Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean."
My second reading of "Fahrenheit 451" after so many years has made me relook at the book in a completely new way and appreciate it much more. All this time I looked at it as a book about a future government banning books, therefore a commentary on censorship. But it is more than that. Or not even ABOUT that exactly.
The book centers on Montag, a fireman of the future, whose job is not to set out fires, but to starts fires, that is burn books and the houses that have illegally harbored them. Through the book, Montag comes to a new realization, that life is not what he wants it to be, and he feels dead inside. He is married, but he feels lonely.
And here is how I looked at the book differently this time. It is about loneliness in the modern world. Everyone is lonely and lose, and happiness has been masked by quick, instant pleasures. The government burns the books, but before this legalization was put into place, it appears that the majority stopped reading books by their own choice. This is not an unpopular law by the government. The mass population supports the law. The government is not evil, they are just following the path that they think increases the satisfaction of their people. And the people are acting the way they are, because quick satisfaction is easier to process. How can we blame them? What should we replace them with? Encourage people to read and ponder, but what has that ever brought us?
Man's quest is for happiness and it is still a formula we have not solved. We know certain things bring us pleasure, so that’s the easiest path to follow, but we look at western countries today, at countries that have some of the highest human comforts and access to easy pleasures, and we wonder, why is the suicide rate so high?
4/5
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