The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden.
Guy Montag was a fireman whose job it was to start fires. And he enjoyed his job. He had been a fireman for ten years, and he had never questioned the pleasure of the midnight runs nor the joy of watching pages consumed by flames...never questioned anything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid. Then Guy met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think. And Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do.
From the opening quote, "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. - Juan Ramon Jimenez"
To the first paragraph, "It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his solid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode into a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. Montage grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame."
To the very end, Fahrenheit 451 is a haunting book. Full of beautiful, flowing prose, yet with not a wasted word, it provides a disturbing view of society's possible future.
It's funny that the death of newspapers and books changed society so immensely in the book. It makes me think about how circulation of newspapers is falling every year in our society as more and more people look to the internet. Inventions like the Kindle work to make traditionally bound books obsolete. Seeing developments like that, I realize that this could happen to us. It really could. In the tradition of 1984, what happens when all our information is electronic? The truth is easily changed, and no one can prove a thing. Creepy, huh?
All is not lost though, as demonstrated by this lovely quote, "Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between a man who just cuts the lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."
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