written by: Ray Bradbury
first published: Ballantine Books, 1953, 179 pages

First published nearly 60 years ago in 1953, “Fahrenheit 451” tells the story of a future world where books are outlawed, and “firemen” have been repurposed as crack teams to swoop in and burn any remaining books that are found, their tanks filled with kerosene instead of water.

Guy Montag is one such  fireman, and happy in his work... maybe. He thought he was, anyway, until a new family moves in next door, and their young daughter starts asking Guy questions for which he does not have ready answers.

Really, it’s the act of asking questions itself that rattles Guy, since in his world, no one questions anything or anyone. They hardly even talk to each other, spending all their time listening to broadcasts on tiny radios in their ears, or interacting with images of a fictitious “family” on giant, wall-sized screens in their homes. Any questions, or anything that is different or unusual, makes everyone uncomfortable.

Once Guy starts to wonder about his world, and his dusty, restless synapses kick out of their dull routines, both Guy and his world start to tear apart.

It’s startling how relevant this book still is. While it might be easy to think that “Fahrenheit 451” is about censorship, Bradbury is explicit in explaining that it wasn’t the government that took the books away; rather, the people just stopped caring, and then, after their ignorance grew for a while, they no longer liked to hear opinions different than theirs. People just preferred to be told something they already agreed with rather than to think about things, and they preferred to be entertained over having conversations with each other.

Here’s Guy’s boss, Captain Beatty, explaining how it all happened:

“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horse, carts, slow motion. Then, in the Twentieth Century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.

...Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary thought!

...School is shortened, discipline relaxed, 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?”

He might as well be describing Twitter, or our abominable habit of reducing all our favorite philosophical quips into one-liners which we Photoshop over postcard-shaped pictures that we paste into Facebook.

And why is Amazon’s popular ebook reader called the “Fire”? Put your books into the Fire, and you no longer need troublesome bookshelves, or bookstores, or libraries. How convenient!

It is astounding that Bradbury was somehow able to divine this from the vantage point of 1953. Television, radio, cars and jet planes, these things seem so innocent to us now, but from these primitive signs and omens he intuited a world of speed, violence, noise and willfull ignorance, of information reduced to factoids and people no longer even understanding what knowledge is.

This is a very dark book. While there are hints of hope, Bradbury does not actually hold up literature and learning as a panacea, as he goes to great lengths to point out that his bookless future came from a world full of books and ideas, and all that knowledge didn’t do a darn bit of good in stopping what came.

Sad as it was when Ray Bradbury passed away a few weeks ago, it might have been a relief to him not to spend another moment in the 21st century.