Burning books

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

I saw the movie version of Fahrenheit 451 way back in the Sixties, but I only recently read Ray Bradbury's novel, published in 1951. Interestingly this novel about book burning is set in a future that is today's present, the third decade of the 21st century.

Firemen aren't starting fires to burn books and the houses that hold them as in the novel, at least not yet, but the banning of certain Dr. Seuss books and Amazon's refusal to sell certain other books does suggest something similar is under way. Once this sort of thing starts, will there be any way to stop it? Will the words of writers as diverse as St. Paul, Mark Twain, David McCullough and even Ursula K. Le Guin and Ray Bradbury be safe in a world where contrary ideas become dangerous ideas? Eventually can't all independent ideas become contrary?

Le Guin, like Bradbury a science fiction author, stood on the left side of the political spectrum, yet it would be interesting to know how she would have reacted to events taking place just a few years after her death? What would she have thought about attempts by today's Left in America to eliminate ideas and opinions they don't like?

Bradbury's novel illustrates Le Guin's words quoted above and written decades later. He describes a time and place where all books are banned, after a gradual process that began perhaps even with books as innocent as those of Dr. Seuss. Now the culture, consumed with entertainment and threatened by incessant war, nears collapse. The "operating instructions" are missing. Mindless television programs play constantly on screens that cover all four walls, but people lack a "useful guide" to their own lives. Only a handful of people who have memorized entire books keep alive a hope for a brighter future.