'Fahrenheit 451' is really coming

By William Roger Jones

Ray Bradbury was way ahead of his time; most sci-fi writers are. His book "Fahrenheit 451" was born in 1950 as “The Fireman”. You could have books, at least for awhile, but it was illegal to read them. Today, 67 years later, some people have books, but they don’t read them, and it’s not illegal to read them. Ironically, everything is going digital, however, that doesn’t increase the reading.

Years ago, one professor deserted his books when he retired. His classroom and office was covered wall-to-wall. I rescued about 300 of them from his third floor classroom. I stored them on tables and counters in our same building basement laboratory. The entire building was due for complete gutting and renovation. After a weekend of laboring, I was satisfied that I had dibs on the best of the lot and returned Monday afternoon to do better sorting. Lo and behold, they were gone! I was told by laborers that they had been tossed in one of the huge construction dumpsters. Unbelievable! The volumes had no chance to go to our campus library or some sort of donation. Never read again! Of course, laborers don’t do much reading.

This tossing of the books amounted to the kerosene fire destruction of books that Montag, a fireman and the main character in "Fahrenheit 451," was concerned about. I wondered if one laborer had set aside three or four to take home for later reading. Like Montag: “And I thought about the books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper.”

And I remembered fire chief Captain Beatty’s lecture to Montag: “I’ve had to read a few books in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They’re about nonexistent people, figments of imagination, if they’re fiction. And if they’re nonfiction, it’s worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another’s gullet.”

And I remembered the character Faber’s words: “Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will see 99 percent of them is in a book.”

The anecdote about the professor who deserted his books when he retired makes an obvious point that there is more than one way to burn a book, including censorship. Also, the popularity of reality TV, the ubiquity of the Internet, and through other communications people are bombarded with sensation; it has all substituted for thinking. Books are dying on the shelves!

The writer has taught conversational English for 15 years. He currently works for Virginia State University. His e-mail address is: wrjones@vsu.edu