451 And Me
—451 And Me—
It was a pleasure to… read this book. Dumb joke. But really, it was—it is. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a winner. It’s one of those books that sticks with you long after the final words, the “one I’ll save for noon. For noon… When we—” When we what? “When we reach the city” says an optimistic Guy Montag upon his departure from the ostracized academics, exiled, set to wander the woods apart from society as the last living copies of some of literature’s and philosophy’s luminaries. Guy Montag, a man who’d been so disillusioned by his so-called cultural and bureaucratic “betters” that he burned books for a living. Enthusiastically. Without question. And it wasn’t until his chance meeting with a 17-year-old girl that his world was turned upside down. Montag would be set free. Unplugged from the Matrix. No longer would he set books ablaze. He’d escape the cave, see the light…
We all (hopefully) know the story. The one of government overreach. Of our willful ignorance. Apathy at the cost of our intellectual curiosity. It’s a story that we should read at least once in our lives; I’m not sure there’s anything quite like it.* Which has lead me to believe that Ray Bradbury was something of a prophet, or at least had a bit of Paul Atreidis soothsayer prescience in him. Because I’m not sure there’s a story that more accurately reflects the state of our affairs today.
This is not a good thing.
Every fall, I teach 451 to my Sophomore English students, and every year it feels more and more, well, real. Students and their [seashell] AirPods, the ones perpetually clamped to their earholes; they walk to class buried in a screen—they walk everywhere buried in a screen. Nearly 100% are scrolling social media, inundated by the innumerable opinions of so-called “content creators”**, the split-second decisions of whether or not to scroll onward. Till you find something juicy. Thus triggering the feel-good dopamine. The never-ending kind. Few students are afraid to share anything controversial that might lead to their being labeled a social pariah. So most just don’t say anything; they turn back to the devices, the Matrix, Mildred’s “parlor walls” and her so-called “family”. There, they are “safe.” There, they don’t have to do anything; they just consume. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
The result?
451.
A world where everyone is the same. Equally apathetic and uninteresting. Too overstimulated, too uninformed and uncaring to have an interesting opinion on anything interesting at all. Speaking to Montag, Captain Beatty implies that it was the apathy of the masses that led to government encroachment; people became less and less patient, the classics were “cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows.” “School,” Beatty continues, “is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate…”
Life is immediate. We’ve become so conditioned to expect—to borrow from the great Win Butler—“Everything Now.” And we become uninterested when it’s not. When we don’t get what we want when we want it. We cut corners; we lose patience; we don’t dwell on and think critically about things. We move on to the next thing, then the next, then the next… Till finally it’s all just noise. Leaving us with, you guessed it: nothing interesting to say about anything interesting.
Admittedly, this is all anecdotal, and my experience is limited to the public high school classroom. But I posit that the public high school classroom is just a micro-dosed sampling of an entire generation—a generation that will one day soon elect presidents and write policy that may dramatically impact our lives. And I am not innocent of it. Everyday, I’m tested. And everyday I succumb. I doom-scroll the Youtubes, skipping content that doesn’t immediately capture my attention. I want to “speed up the film, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Bing, Bong, Boom.” I want the readers’ digest, the “Digests-digests-digests…” I, despite my best attempts, am not always present. Our world today has made it rather difficult to be okay with the moment, to just be.
451 teaches me to be wary of the noise. The damned noise. All mushy and milquetoast. To not be overcome by it. To combat it. I like to tell my students that 451 teaches me to become a more interesting person. Because the world needs more interesting people.
Be one of them.
That’s all for now.
-Taylor
*Yes, I’m aware of 1984; Brave New World; Anthem, etc. Get off my ass about it ugh.
**Many of these content creators do indeed produce great work; some are my friends.
TJH -- 11.20.2024