keeks’s Reviews > Fahrenheit 451 > Status Update

Finished the book part, onto the history, context, and criticism part!

“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” LOL

Roles of fire are so interesting — destruction/taking, warmth/giving, natural vs. mechanical light, ashes, phoenix

“And someday, after it sets in us a long time, it’ll come out our hands in our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right”
It was an interesting philosophy those scholars seemed to have. The waiting game.

Guy imagines millie “leaning toward the great shimmering walls of color and motion, where the family talked and talked and talked to her…and smiled at her and said nothing of the bomb that was an inch, now half an inch, now a quarter inch from the top of the hotel. Leaning into the wall as if all the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there.”

Not just books, but knowledge, in its many forms.
“Walk carefully. Guard your health. If anything should happen to Harris, you are the book of Ecclesiastes. See how important you’ve become in the last minute!”

“When we were separate individuals, all we had was rage”

"For no reason at all in the world they would have killed me" - montag abt driving kids
In this society, where kids go to school attached to screens and come home attached to screens, they do not read, do not build empathy, or the ability to consider diverse perspectives, or even recognize humanity outside of themselves. And maybe it was social acceptance or just asshole teenagers, but we all know, it's probably not.

All his time admiring fire and its destruction, yet Beatty's (arrogance?) blinds him. He fails to consider: this house, full of things, things that torment Montag and have only exacerbated his dissatisfaction into disillusionment, is cathartically burning. Burn the consumption, the parasocial, the constant buzzing, the ode to society, the performance of it all. Let it burn. Let it all burn. (This is my guess)

Capt Beatty is so full of contradictions and keeps dropping little tidbits (other times spewing fountains of literary references). I'm most interested in his role and in finding connections to today. Is it cognitive dissonance alone? Is it dissatisfaction or disillusionment? What caused it? Where are we at risk of cultivating similar antagonists (at this point in time, I'm considering him an antagonist enough)