Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book

One of the primary functions of a good book is to expose ideas to the reader, who is limited by her experiences and surroundings. A good author in his writing attempts to show details of life and humans to the readers. A reader, who has read enough good books can’t not fall in love with books and the value they provide. Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 discusses about what makes books special. It is the inherent property of the book, which is well written and well read, can have long standing effects on our thoughts and perception of life. If spent enough time with them, they can change the way you live.

Books, Talking, Walking

In the book, Faber tells Montag three important things about books, that I think are unique features of books.

  1. Books are known for quality of information. Good ones contain infinite detail and awareness about life.

    Good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her to flies.

  2. Books give you enough time to think about the content inside it. In case of television and radio, the information is thrown at you at high speed leaving you no time to think about what is told. That is why reading a book should be preferred over passive activities like watching television or radio.

  3. The right to carry out actions based on what we have learnt from the interaction of the first two. When you think enough what you read in the books, your perception, thought processes begin to change and some of the things start getting clear. This is more likely to happen in case of books rather than any other media because one has spent enough time and mental effort in gathering those ideas while reading.

There are activities other than reading that are mentioned in the book, which help you to think and understand yourselves and your surroundings. Walking and Talking are the two activities. The government in the book uses subtle steps to curb them. Clarisse tells Montag that once houses used to have porches where people used to sit, talk or just think. But later, the houses got rid of the porches.

In a similar manner, we find kids driving vehicles at a very high speed on the roads, which resulted in killing pedestrians(Montag is also hurt by one such vehicle and wonders if Clarisse, who loves to walk, was also killed by such a vehicle). But such an activity is not at all a crime because the government doesn’t want people to walk on the roads. When you walk, you get time to reflect. The government wants to avoid that. The result being people watch the screens or listen to the radio around the clock like Mildered.

Some damn good lines

Beatty, Faber and Granger deliver some great pieces of wisdom to Montag.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting

Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose

The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us

One heck of a line about human bias!

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies… A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime

The above lines remind me of the word Soul Shards used by Douglas Hofstadter in the book I am a Strange Loop. Books, photographs, videos and other objects that hold memories are not mere records of the past. They are soul shards of people who are represented in them. When you look a photograph of a loved one, it brings out the clearest representations of him/her. When you read someone’s writings, it gives you an understanding of a person’s internal emotions and a sense of what it means to be that person. Though you may be physically not present with the writer, she is capable of affecting your thoughts directly as though she were present with you at the moment. That’s why it is important to record beautiful moments and individual thoughts in the form of writings, photographs or videos.

Another beautiful thing that the lines remind me is one of Feynman’s anecdotes. When Feynman was nearing death, he asked his friend and colleague Danny Hillis why Hillis appeared so sad. Hillis replied that he thought Feynman was going to die soon. Feynman said that this sometimes bothered him, too, adding, when you get to be as old as he was, and have told so many stories to so many people, even when he was dead he would not be completely gone.

Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that, shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.

Any quote in the lines of Nietzche’s idea of living dangerously is a great quote!

I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons…or play violin..or tell us jokes the way he did. He was an individual an important man…what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hand. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

Granger talks about his Grandfather here. We value people over their actions. If you love someone, it means you feel their actions and you believe that their contribution to your life and the world around you is unique.

Bradbury and Books

Ray Bradbury himself mentioned that the book was about moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids instead of censorship. Yet, at several places, we find that book depicted and predicted about censorship of books so well.

Bradbury is a huge fan of books. This love is apparent when you read the epilogue

…breathing the finest pollen in the world, book dust, with which to develop literary allergies

Bradbury got attracted to books and library at a early stage in life. Like all lovers of books he believes that good books can have a great impact on society. He writes in epilogue

…if we ensure that by the end of sixth year every child in every country can live in libraries to learn almost by osmosis, then our drug, street gang, rape and murder scores will suffer themselves near zero. But the fire chief in mid-novel, says it all, predicting the one minute TV commercial with three images per second and no respite from the bombardment. Listen to him, know what he says, then go sit with your child, open a book and turn the page.

DFW

In one of the interviews of David Foster Wallace, he touches upon these issues of mass media consumption. He says that with the ever increasing pace in the world, people want everything so fast. Everything is available instantly. It is very hard to sit by yourself alone in a quite room and read a book. There are two parts of you inside - one that craves for immediate gratification and the other part that loves silence. We are progressing towards an era where we are feeding the former and starving the later.

The interview also touches upon another advantage of books. He argues that mass media production is expensive. So, in order to get profit for your high investment, you have to produce something that is widely appealing. So, there is less scope for deep ideas that are difficult to grasp in first attempt to exposure and more scope for sex in the media content. A solution according to DFW can be that industry can be fragmented based on niche interests. In this way it can be ensured that production house will have a fixed set of people who are purchasing their content and they don’t have to appeal to a wide audience. Books on other hand don’t have to be made appealing! The purpose of the book is to convey what author had in mind. A well written book will always have an audience unless Bradbury’s dystopian future becomes true.

David’s insights are brilliant! It is one of the best interviews on YouTube. Go watch it!

Post Scriptum

  • The effects of television on children is expressed nicely in the poem Television by Roald Dahl.
  • Check this answer containing excerpts of Bradbury talking about his book’s interpretation.