This my first reading of this classic. I guess my school didn’t consider it worth it even though it is only 158 pages. Reading this for the first time after 50 likely makes my judgement more harsh as I have no childhood obsession to defend. I didn’t like this book. I liked the last 20 pages or so but I think it would have been better shorter as the first 100 pages were a struggle for me. I have a half baked theory that the reason so many people adore this book is because they place so much emotional value on physical books and the idea of burning them is such sacrilege that this book grabbed them at a deep level.
I’m not saying this book is worthless. The images of our society rotting from the inside because we grab our attention with fantasy resonates in this century even more than last. The idea that through books and memory and remembering we can make this a better place fills me hope. This is my first Ray Bradbury novel and maybe I just don’t like his writing style. Given that it’s so short I think everybody should read it because it does speak to our current century and our struggles with attention and our disdain for old thoughts because they don’t sound cool or can’t be put in a tweet.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book.
School is shortened, discipline relax, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually 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?
Page 53
Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, mormons, baptist, unitarians, second generation chinese, sweets, italians, germans, texas, brooklynites, irishman, people from Oregon or mexico. 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!
Page 54-55
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll
Page 100
Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he’s the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them. Look where they got you, and slime up to your lip. If I stir the slime with my little finger, you’ll drown.
Page 111-112
A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.
Page 146
Grandfather’s been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, and the convolutions of my brain you’d find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said, earlier, he was a sculptor.
Page 150
And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.
Page 156
And hold on to one thought: You’re not important. You’re not anything. Someday the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before it. We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, we’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And someday we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest goddamn steam shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.
Page 156-157
The Polen Report 