My 8th grade honors class has started reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a prescient novel from 1953 about a dystopian future where it is the job of firemen to start fires rather than to extinguish them. And every such fire begins with the discovery of a homeowner illegally in possession of a book.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Reading is shunned while distracting technology is wholeheartedly embraced.<\/p>\n\n\n
The hero, Guy Montag, is a fireman who gets a little too curious about the books he is tasked with destroying, sneaking one home to secretly peruse, looking for something that is missing from his life.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Guy recalls once meeting an old English professor in a park and suspecting the man was concealing a book of poetry. Now he seeks out professor Faber looking for clues as to what books can offer.<\/p>\n\n\n
I have read Fahrenheit 451 several times before and even taught it before. But this time through I am seeing something important that I missed before: the story is not really about burning books. It is about the loss of what Faber says books represent.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Montag complains to Faber, “We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew<\/i> was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.”<\/p>\n\n\n
And Faber responds, “It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books.”\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
He elaborates that three things associated with books are missing:<\/p>\n\n\n
1) “Truthfully recorded details of life”<\/p>\n\n\n
2) “Time to think”<\/p>\n\n\n
3) “The right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two”<\/p>\n\n\n
Whoa. This hits me in a way I never saw before. During the six months I was unemployed, I found #1 and #2. Now with a new position and a new stage of life and career, I am in the process of #3. I wish everyone could experience at least this aspect of my past year. I jokingly called it a sabbatical, but that is what it has been, at least when the concept of sabbatical lives up to its true potential.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Here’s one more line that Bradbury puts in Faber’s mouth that I am chewing on because it also rings true with my recent experience with books:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
“The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.”<\/p>\n\n\n
Hmmm. Interesting in light of the fact that the book Montag carries with him on his visit to Faber’s house is … the Bible.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My 8th grade honors class has started reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a prescient novel from 1953 about a dystopian future where it is the job of firemen to start fires rather than to extinguish them. And every such fire begins with the discovery of a homeowner illegally in possession of a book.\u00a0 Reading is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10242,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241\/revisions\/10242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}