Unorthodox as it is for my reviews, I think with this one, I'll begin with a quote. It's from a piece in this edition entitled "Coda" by Ray Bradbury, on the subject of censorship. He wrote here:
"Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count 'em) short stories in it. how do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book? Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down, and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito-out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron's mouth twitch-gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer-lost.
"Every story slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like-in the finale-Edgar Guest. every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one's instant attention-shot dead....
"The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/ Italian/ Octogenarian/ Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib / Republican, Mattachine / Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."
WOW!
This is a perplexing, yet profound book, which emerged in the wake of unprecedented events in world history, so perhaps its dystopic nature is understandable. Eller, in the short piece "The Story of Fahrenheit 4151" stated that one of its primary influences was Arthur Koesteler, in that "only a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin achieved... Only Koestler got the full range of desecration, execution and forgetfulness on a mass and nameless graveyard scale," which in turn shaped the course of this complex book.
-----------Notable Passages------------
If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. let him forget there is such a thing as war. if the government is inefficient, top-heavy and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it... Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology ot tie things up with. That way lies with melancholy.
Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they snitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.
Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen.
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do... so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.
Hold onto one thought: You're not important. You're not anything. Some day the lod 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 us. 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 way, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run.
"Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count 'em) short stories in it. how do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book? Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down, and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito-out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron's mouth twitch-gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer-lost.
"Every story slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like-in the finale-Edgar Guest. every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one's instant attention-shot dead....
"The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/ Italian/ Octogenarian/ Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib / Republican, Mattachine / Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."
WOW!
This is a perplexing, yet profound book, which emerged in the wake of unprecedented events in world history, so perhaps its dystopic nature is understandable. Eller, in the short piece "The Story of Fahrenheit 4151" stated that one of its primary influences was Arthur Koesteler, in that "only a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin achieved... Only Koestler got the full range of desecration, execution and forgetfulness on a mass and nameless graveyard scale," which in turn shaped the course of this complex book.
-----------Notable Passages------------
If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. let him forget there is such a thing as war. if the government is inefficient, top-heavy and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it... Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology ot tie things up with. That way lies with melancholy.
Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they snitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.
Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen.
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do... so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.
Hold onto one thought: You're not important. You're not anything. Some day the lod 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 us. 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 way, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run.
