"A letter to my granddaughter Lynn." - Heartfelt Commentary by our Roving Correspondent

My dear granddaughter,
I'm glad you took my suggestion to read Fahrenheit 451. I'm offering the following info just in case it is helpful for you in recognizing its timeless significance regarding what's happening right now in your time, as well as many other times in my life. My introduction to Bradbury at 15 (the year Fahrenheit was published - can you imagine I was ever 15?!) was The Martian Chronicles. You might be interested to know one of his most recent books is The Homecoming, about a family reunion of vampires.

Fahreheit 451 is a cautionary tale written by a master writer of science fiction illustrating a dystopia - an imaginary place where conditions are extremely bad. (opposite of utopia - an imaginary place where conditions are perfect.)

The question the book asks is whether people can be dominated by burning their books - the documents of their history, their literature, their creative expression of ideas - and by filling the void in their heads with mind numbing TV entertainment.

As you can probably imagine, I can suggest many things to you that I see happening in our world right now which call our attention to the importance of this question. I'll bet you can too. For now, I'll just say I'm watching another round of the same old argument over whether freedom or tyranny is more likely to balance commercial enterprise with human compassion, and I think it is very important that a lot of people are arguing about this matter now!

From the author's home site - raybradbury.com, here is one story about the book, published in 1953, that might make you laugh as to its relevance today:

In the late '50s, Bradbury observed that the novel touches on the alienation of people by media:

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

Bradbury directly foretells this incident early in the work:

And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talking coming in. (page 12 - not sure if that's true of your paperbook copy)



ALSO - Bradbury has said that television destroying interest in reading literature leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of "factoids", partial information devoid of context, e.g., Napoleon's birth date alone, without an indication of who he was.



It's my experience that access to fuller factual information helps keep the conversation going - prevents shutting off dissenting ideas which is obviously a very important ingredient of our Constitution - see the First Amendment's confirmation of freedom of speech.



Perhaps our current President's pursuit of his campaign promise to "fundamentally transform America" is not a threat to our freedoms, but it is important for us all to pay attention if we want to keep our Republic which Benjamin Franklin warned would take a lot of work. I suspect he and the other Founding Fathers hoped for just the kind of work that's happening now - civil discourse - conversation - debate - all the sharing of all sorts of ideas from books and from people just living their own lives. And right now, I'm very thankful for the internet, which is rumoured to be another current target of governmental control.

I am writing all this to you because young people like you keep up my hopes that America will remain as promising for your generation as it has been for mine.
xoxoxo