"And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering."
Just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Going in I had high expectations and I wasn't at all disappointed. On the surface it's a good storyline, but when you read into it it's so heavy. Every couple pages I just had to stop and think. Just as Brave New World, it's scary to think how similar our society is today. This passage especially struck me:
Granger looked into the fire. "Phoenix."
"What?"
"There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation."
And also later on, this bit:
"...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 say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them."
Overall, a very good book that leaves you really thinking about how society behaves. Are we really just people who are being taught that being intellectual is anti-social and being ignorant and physically oriented is the best? Are we so concentrated on our electronic screens that flash programs and ads in our faces that we're starting to forget what's really going on in our world?
Next book up will probably be "Nonviolence, The History of A Dangerous Idea" by Mark Kurlansky. After reading Fahrenheit 451, watching Battle In Seattle, and reading up on why some books were banned and challenged, I'm feeling a great dislike, moreso than usual, of the Man. A disgust for war and a violent society has sort of bubbled up out of nowhere. Usually I'm like "Well, if they want to go to war with this country, whatever. Man's been going to war since the dawn of time, what's so different about now? They say they're protecting us, soooo...." But now it's like, just, idk, I want to get away from it. The same government that puts one man in prison for life for murder, justifies mass murder by saying they're doing the right thing and have a cause? For me, right now must be just one of those life-points where one's views shift and grow a bit.