Book Responses

October 17, 2012

Our Lives in Books

Author's Note: The majority of the Academy 21 English class decided to read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury as their first term novel. We were given various options of prompts to respond to and I chose to respond to, "Select one or more of the social predictions Bradbury lays out in the novel so far and discuss how you see it coming true in modern society." The prompt means, What does he see happening to a society where people stop reading and learning? How do people lose their freedom due to lack to respecting ways of thinking?  I attempted to include the repetitive pattern and more highly developed vocabulary in my response.   I understand I am probably a rusty from the summer so please leave me some feedback.

Day after day we go to school opening our laptops, grabbing our books, and flipping through our papers. Insignificant words seem to blur out and get lost as we read, but when we find something that provides entertainment, pleasure, or importance it's never forgotten.  Those pieces stand out because they connect to something that we cherish or believe in.  Books are written works of people’s lives that help us experience and explore things in ways we wouldn’t be able to on our own. Books allow us to look at the world through the eyes of others.

In Fahrenheit 451, Montag, by choosing to simply live as a fireman, has forgotten his point of life. In our society, we trust firemen to protect our lives from harm, but in the dystopic novel, they obliterate lives. Our everyday lives happen because we have education and freedom. The firemen lack education which makes it nearly impossible to understand the point of books; therefore they burn books along with every person’s education and freedom.

"…I've had to read a few 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 and idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet." (p 92)

Books may not be realistic, but they create a world that we can only imagine, they discover concepts for us to explore, and they educate us in ways we cannot speak.  Our desires and dreams are tended by the culture that books give us.  Authors lose their freedom to share their opinions and theories if books no longer exist. Written down stories and parts of history would be lost if books no longer exist. Freedom would be lost if books no longer exist.

The firemen have lost their freedom. They carelessly burn books without knowing that they burn their freedom with it. In a world where books cannot be owned, people don't get the education from books, fiction or non-fiction, which gives them freedom. Therefore, they live sheltered and conventional lives.

Freedom exists because we possess education.  A significant branch of education comes from the intangible experiences that books offer us.  With no freedom, living would appear useless due to sense of control by someone else.  Our lives revolve around ideas that will not always be practical, but with books, freedom is not an issue.