Fahrenheit 451

I popped into Borders with my nephew today. His parents told him that he could buy only one book, so he went around the children's section diligently, checking out books and gasping at their prices before settling on a book called Small Steps, the sequel to Holes.

As for me, I went around and bought four books: Other Colors (Orhan Pamuk), M is for Magic (Neil Gaiman), An Ode Less Travelled (Stephen Fry), and The Making of a Poem (Mark Strand and Eavan Boland). Recently, I told myself that if I were to step into a bookstore, I could buy only books by authors that I hadn't read before. Unfortunately, this proved harder to carry out than I expected. I already have books of the first three authors listed above.

I came back home too late to get a haircut and so I decided to read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Just finished it and probably finished it too fast. This book was written in 1953, and its message is still as important now as it was then. I think it's best summed up by this saying:

Where they burn books, they will end up burning human beings, too.
- German poet Heinrich Heine

The book has this excerpt which I like a lot because it paints an encouraging picture of humankind:
"But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing."

And of course, given my recent interest in poetry, I was delighted to come across a beautiful old poem, Dover Beach, written in 1867 by Martin Arnold, a part of which was recited by Montag the firefighter in the Bradbury book:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.