Book Burning!

I just finished re-reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and it spoke to me on the power of books and the importance of authenticity. In this book, the firemen burn books to keep society from thinking, so people can have fun and get lost in their entertainment wall panels and made-up “families.” Some of the best quotes in the book are things the fire chief Faber says, as for example, when he describes books that have quality: “To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features . . . the more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are . . . the good writers touch life often.”

In the Afterward, Ray Bradbury discusses making the book into a play and some of the things that changed from the novel. The Fire Chief, Faber, says “Why, life happened to me . . . the love that wasn’t quite right, the dream that went sour, the sex that fell apart, the deaths that came swiftly to friends not deserving, the murder of someone or another, the insanity of someone close, the slow death of a mother, the abrupt suicide of a father . . . nowhere the right book for the right time to stuff in the crumbling wall of the breaking dam to hold back the deluge.” The books offered “no help, no solace, no peace, no harbor, no true love, no bed, no light.”

Bradbury discusses, in Coda, how he found that his editors were shortening his stories as well as others for anthologies. They aimed at “Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquite--out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch--gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer--lost!” And Bradbury then fired the whole lot, “By sending rejection slips to each and every one.” As he goes on to say, “The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Another comment, worthy of mention: “For, let’s face it, 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 winder 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.”