# books / Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

This 1984-esque novella has an intriguing sub-absurdist linguistic style that pulls you in from the early pages. Its active mode of description is especially captivating — rather than trying to paint a picture it brings this unusual world to life. The kind of book, at least at its outset, that makes you dive for pen and ink to take up your own writing.

The book raises an important set of questions: to what extent should we pursue and prioritise happiness, joy? At the expense of knowledge, learning and curiosity? Beatty represents the view that learning is opposed to happiness, that intellect is elitist snobbery. Therefore burn the books. The counter point as brought by Faber and eventually others, is that the world and those in it benefit from this learning. There is meaning beyond happiness, to discover, and explore ambiguities.

Beatty seeks to destroy all that offends or upsets, and eventually everything has been censored, leaving a hollow, over-stimulated, sleepwalking populous. TV shows about nothing whatsoever play at all hours. Cars move at hundreds of miles an hour to drown out the void. Even funerals are dropped, because nobody should be made sad.

Is there anything we can learn from this in the 21st Century? What price are we willing to pay for unrelenting pleasure? Like the rat in the cage, hitting the orgasm button over and over. Is there meaning in happiness alone? The book’s undercurrent of suicide, divorce, hate and war suggest otherwise.

I felt it tailed off in the final third, as it attempts to transfer its general commentary on the stupification and hedonism of a population, into a slightly hurried exemplification. The world around them is all but destroyed, and the point that ‘history forgotten is repeated’ is shoehorned in.

Bradbury repeats one important point throughout: the banning of books was not imposed. It came from the citizens, who chose stimulation and absorption, inoffense and “certainty”, over book reading and thought. It leaves one lingering question for us all, as much a concern today as when Fahrenheit 451 was written:

What happens if we do stop reading? If children’s interests in addictive games and binge television replace their desire and curiosity for knowledge, insight and thought?

Are we choosing hedonism? Are we on a path to burning the books?