“You sound so very old.”
“Sometimes I’m ancient. I’m afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use [sic] to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I’m afraid of them and they don’t like me because I’m afraid. My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn’t kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different.”
“There are many actors alone who haven’t acted Pirandello or Shaw or Shakespeare for years because their plays are too aware of the world. We could use their anger. And we could use the honest rage of those historians who haven’t written a line for forty years. True, we might form classes in thinking and reading.”
“Yes!”
“But that would just nibble the edges. The whole culture’s shot through. The skeleton needs melting and reshaping. Good God, it isn’t as simple as just picking up a book you laid down half a century ago. Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus every now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it’s a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels any more. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily…In any event, you’re a fool. People are having fun.
“Committing suicide! Murdering!”
–Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1951)
Dear Heather,
I am still trying to catch my breath after reading this. You have a gift for finding connections that are startlingly TRUE. My jaw hit the floor on this one. Hard to believe the prescience of these words and thank God for helping you find them and putting them out there again. Whew.