FAHRENHEIT 451

Dear me,

I decided to read this book, a classic, because I am interested in propaganda and it seemed like a good choice. It's much shorter than my last book, 179 pages. It's fiction, and figurative. It's well written and melancholy, real but more surreal... It's a lot of things. I suppose I should analyze a quote, then.

He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He said these words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

This is the moment in which Guy takes her words to heart, her being the girl he met, Clarisse. He takes them to heart perhaps too much. Yes, it is perhaps an act of over-contemplation. But he knows that he is not happy, and it comes at him not like a baseball or an orange, firm and ripe and aimed square in the face, it comes to him rather like a swift and unforgiving tide. In a single pulse, the cover is wrenched away, the cover that lay stagnant for as long as he chose to ignore it. It is him, now, she has discovered him, and he is alone in his house with his wife who has downed sleeping pills like a child might candies, her breath faint as the dull flicker of a cat's ear in a quiet room. He is left unsettled, yes, for his wife had quite scared him half to death, only to retreat obliviously in the morning. Guy is bored. He is not happy. He is perhaps, what he knows is wrong with his actions manifest, and it hangs around his shoulders like a limp but grotesquely weighty corpse. It is such a thing you cannot forget.

And then, in this quote below, we see some of Clarisse's nature, perhaps. She is told she is peculiar and their conversation reflects it, she is observant but carefree, really.

They walked still further and the girl said, "Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?"
"No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it."
"Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames."
He laughed.
She glanced quickly over. "Why are you laughing?"
"I don't know." He started to laugh again and then stopped. "Why?"
"You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to think what I've asked you."

It is, of course, a story of a man who does atrocious things but never stops to question them until he realizes how atrocious they are, until he realizes that law is not a pair with righteousness, that some laws can and should be broken for the greater good. Of course he would not stop to think yet, then, no such person would search for meaning, for thought. His thoughts were bland. However after this conversation his thoughts are errant, intense, pounding upon his conscience as roughly as a furious lion, as quickly as a bat out of hell. It's admirable, entertaining. We'll see.

Until next time,
Irene