How things change by the end of the story, both for Montag, and the reader.

This book reminds me of the saying, “civilization is eighteen inches long,” a reference to the distance a book is held in front of your eyes when reading. It can be argued, I suppose, that civilization shrinks with age, but that is another matter. It is clear from dialogue between Montag and his wife, Mildred—who slumbers yet—that Bradbury must agree with this. “Maybe the books can get us halfway out of our cave,” says Montag, to a spouse who not only can’t see through the fog, but is part of it.

But Montag doesn’t awaken entirely by his own power. Like many who come to realize that living doesn’t just mean being alive, Montag requires a catalyst to set the wheels in motion, to force him to question. He sees around him isolated examples that reflect his own disturbing realization that all is not quite right. Clarisse McClellan, Montag’s seventeen-year-old neighbor, stokes the flame that would consume Montag’s world, not by impassioned pleas, but with straightforward questions. She simply asks “why”, when others are content to accept the status quo. Her inquiry is contagious.

Montag’s contact with Faber, an old man who lives on the fringe of society, is another example of such an influence. As Faber tells him, “I don’t talk things, sir…I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.” This in a world that has largely given up on asking why.

Bradbury includes scenes that bump up against other literary traditions, though sometimes you have to look for it. He describes a scene where, as a boy visiting the beach, Montag is told by a cousin that if he fills a sieve with sand he will get a dime. Of course Montag tries to accomplish this impossible task, and is rewarded only with faster flowing sand as he struggles harder and harder. The Russian literary tradition of the “superfluous man” describes an individual who, despite his best efforts, has no impact. The sieve meets the superfluous man in a moment of quintessential Bradbury.

Although Fahrenheit was published in 1953, the modern reader has to wonder if maybe Bradbury had a glimpse of the 1990s before penning this tale. Some of his descriptions are beyond Orwellian. For example, he describes a television screen the “size of a postal card”. Says Faber to Montag: “I always wanted something I could walk to, something I could blot out with the palm of my hand.” This may be the earliest description of something very similar to a palm computer.

Bradbury also describes an age when despite the illegality of books, acquisition of information by the authorities is pervasive. “Don’t think the police don’t know the habits of queer ducks like that,” says Granger, an exiled bookworm, to Montag. “Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy.”

Clearly the government had a pretty slick information system. Bradbury wrote this before the Internet. Before computers. Before the Patriot Act.

Could’ve been after.

Fahrenheit 451 is like that.

Read it. You’ll be glad you did.