For the first time, I read Ray Bradbury’s classic and I wanted to ponder book burning in Fahrenheit 451 what is it about ?

This book isn’t about us, right? It’s about those other people who burn books. Because it’s the book-burning book, right? The one about the people who censor and ban and burn? 

I mean, it certainly is. It’s right there in the title. I’d never read it before. It begins

It was a pleasure to burn.

Of course it’s about book burning. 

And so it’s not about us, right? But about book burners?

Except there’s a problem. The problem isn’t with the word to burn but rather what it modifies: a pleasure. 

This isn’t a book about rampant pleasures, is it? 

It’s a book about taking a Gooooood Morning Vietnam flamethrower to a collected works of Dickens, right? 

Isn’t it a book about all those bad people tossing Bibles and Qurans and Mishnahs on the ash heap of history? 

Yet, why does Millie, who doesn’t burn books, overdose on sleeping pills? 

And why, when the EMTs arrive, do they pump Millie’s stomach and change her blood?

And why does the next door neighbor girl Clarisse’s family complain that society full of illiterates? 

Is it really because of the book burning?

I mean, why is Clarisse so interested in frigging grass and trees and not television? 

Millie doesn’t burn books, but she’s obsessed with the parlor wall’s entertainment — televisions lining the walls — so why do those become for her a sort of “family” ? 

And when Captain Beatty shows up to explain how we got to book burning, why does he say the whole history? 

“When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where, when? Well, I’d say it really got started around about a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule-book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn’t get along well until photography came into its own. Then–motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.”

Montag sat in bed, not moving.

“And because they had mass, they became simpler,” said Beatty. “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?”

“I think so.”

Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”

“Snap ending.” Mildred nodded.

“Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour of a title to you, Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: ‘now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours.’ Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down. Beatty ignored her and continued

“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”

Does it sound like social media yet?

Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and jump again as she patted his pillow. Right now she was pulling at his shoulder to try to get him to move so she could take the pillow out and fix it nicely and put it back. And perhaps cry out and stare or simply reach down her hand and say, “What’s this?” and hold up the hidden book with touching innocence.

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”

Does it sound like STEM classes yet? Coding bootcamp for kids?

“Let me fix your pillow,” said Mildred.

“No! ” whispered Montag,

“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at. dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”

Mildred said, “Here.”

“Get away,” said Montag.

“Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang; boff, and wow!”

“Wow,” said Mildred, yanking at the pillow.

“For God’s sake, let me be!” cried Montag passionately.

Beatty opened his eyes wide.

Mildred’s hand had frozen behind the pillow. Her fingers were tracing the book’s outline and as the shape became familiar her face looked surprised and then stunned. Her mouth opened to ask a question . . .

“Empty the theatres save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colours running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne. You like baseball, don’t you, Montag?”

Sound like the shadow that Broadway has become? Times Square? Instagram booths? 

“Baseball’s a fine game.”

Now Beatty was almost invisible, a voice somewhere behind a screen of smoke

“What’s this?” asked Mildred, almost with delight. Montag heaved back against her arms. “What’s this here?”

“Sit down!” Montag shouted. She jumped away, her hands empty. “We’re talking ! “

Beatty went on as if nothing had happened. “You like bowling, don’t you, Montag?”

“Bowling, yes.”

“And golf?”

“Golf is a fine game.”

“Basketball?”

“A fine game.”.

 “Billiards, pool? Football?” 

“Fine games, all of them.” 

“More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.”

Sound like the proliferation of leagues? Of boardgames? Of image-centric books and iPad games? 

Of Air BnB?

Mildred went out of the room and slammed the door. The parlour “aunts” began to laugh at the parlour “uncles.”,

“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!”

Sound like Disney’s biggest films yet?

“All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three?dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade-journals.”

Porn hub? Only fans? Lite books? 

“Yes, but what about the firemen, then?” asked Montag.

“Ah.” Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. “What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.”

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

Does it get any harder?

“Black people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”

Does that strike at our revisionist hearts? Our attempts to use white-out on historical uses of unjust phrases? When the main character has an earpiece blasting news at him, does it remind us of AirPods and podcasts?

When his real-life manhunt starts being live streamed on every television in every house, does it remind us of Twitch and YouTube and content creators? 

And when he finally memorizes the text at the end — like the other intellectuals who have rescued him — and they must use one of the pages for kindling, when he extracts no pleasure in the burning, but knows he must use it for fire and that the text is internalized forever, do we weep for the book burning or weep for the pleasure we lost?

Ray Bradbury seems to be saying there are two ways to burn a book.

One is the deliberate way that Nazis do. By throwing it in a fire. These are the easy people to hate.

What’s hard is to hold up the mirror so that we must renounce our pleasures for something bolder and older: actually memorizing and internalizing long, classic texts of literature. 

Because the other way to burn a book is through the noise of television, headlines, podcasts, and meaningless twittering.

The other way to burn a book is to stack on top of it the weight of so much noise — such a firehose of disinformation and misinformation and propaganda and “pleasing” entertainment — that it spontaneously combusts from implosion. This is why national news outlets can become a bully pulpit if they don’t listen to the plight of the poor who have no voice.

Sometimes it’s the book burners you have to watch out for. Those so ascetic and damnably Puritanical that they’ll destroy everything, even themselves, in route to saving the world. Those who never stop to consider if there will be any world left to save.

Sometimes it’s the pleasure seekers. Those numb to life.

It was:
a pleasure ——————— to burn.

Folks on both the left side and the right side of the diagram can keep you from reading and memorizing the old books.