I thought I’d read this book before, but after finishing it this week, I’m not sure I have. I thought Fahrenheit 451 was a book about book burning and censorship, which it is, but it’s moreso a book about feeling threatened by ideas. In it, government didn’t insist on banning books. A particular political wing didn’t insist on banning books. Instead, society elected to stop reading books. Life felt easier and less dangerous and “happier” when people didn’t have to be confronted with the conflicts, tension, messiness and open questions of what it means to be human and alive and interacting with the world around us.

451 ℉ is the temperature at which paper burns, and in Fahrenheit 451, the burning of books is the hook that catches the reader.  Rather than putting out fires, firemen burn. They respond to calls that report neighbors who own books, and they show up with their flame throwers instead of their fire hoses. The imagery is compelling.

But what it’s really about, and what is frightening in its prescience, is that though this book was published in 1951, it predicts a world where people are so distracted and consumed with screens and with listening devices in their ears at all times, to the media that is firehosed at them, that they stop thinking for themselves. That’s what this is about, and what books represent in the novel: individuals’ thoughts and ideas. The people in the Fahrenheit 451 world don’t question. They don’t think for themselves. They don’t engage with art or ideas, or think about the world around them or the choices they make. They stop interacting with the actual physical world. They don’t touch grass or watch cattle graze.  And while they’re all inside their homes being controlled and “happy” because they are avoiding the messiness of reality, they get bombed to smithereens. 

The main character in the book, Guy Montag, is a fireman, and realizes early in the book that he’s not actually happy, it is not actually “a pleasure to burn.” He is empty inside. He doesn’t know his own mind. Until he begins to read the books he’s squirreled away over his years as a fireman, stealing them from the houses he burns.

Ironically, or perhaps not, this book has been banned many times. It’s about so much more than burning books, and it shocked me to see the earbuds in particular. Nothing like that existed in 1951, but boy do they now. I bet Ray Bradbury would have been an interesting person to hang out with.