"How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long long time, listening to the warm crackel of the flames."
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Fahrehenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns and substantive knowledge and information is destroyed.
Ray Bradbury was writing about the danger of "truthiness" long before the idea was clear or the phrase first coined.
He knew that when people stopped reading and got their news from a talking automaton on television, bad things were just around the corner.
He knew.
.
1 comment:
I loved a quote I read of his today. To paraphrase, he said he would sometimes pick up a book he'd written, read something from decades before that had become true in present day, and say to himself, "I wrote that?"
I read "The Martian Chronicles" as a kid, and was pretty much obsessed by "The Illustrated Man" and "Fahrenheit 451". Now THAT was some good kid-reading!
Seahorse
Post a Comment