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Existential Airport Anxiety

2012-09-18 · John · watch on YouTube · Books & writing · reflection essay

Responding to the second half of Fahrenheit 451 from a TV-filled airport, John argues the novel is about choosing distraction over engagement, revises his view that books are the cure, and with David Foster Wallace links distraction to fear of a deeper pain.

What is said

00:00:00 — Airport full of TVs; the second half of Fahrenheit 451: criticism of Faber's deus ex machina and overwrought symbols (Granger's mirror factory), yet stories that can go under the microscope

  • ★ John records on a Sunday in an airport that, he says, attacks visitors with an astonishing number of televisions, while waiting for a delayed flight. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John grants that the second half of Fahrenheit 451 is often criticized for Professor Faber's deus ex machina arrival and overwrought symbols, like Granger's mirror factory. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ John still loves the novel because, as Faber says of another book, it can go under the microscope; such stories fill us up and make us feel more alive. — 00:00:32

00:01:01 — Montag's shouty walls, phones and social media used for distraction; John was wrong that books are the solution: the medium doesn't matter, the ideas do; science fiction and high culture

  • ★★★ Recalling Montag's line about walls yelling at him, John says we literally live in a world of shouty walls, and his phone holds billions of voices on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. — 00:01:01 · Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook
  • ★★★ John agrees with Montag that nobody feels listened to, because we don't listen to the voices on social media; we just use them for distraction. — 00:01:01
  • ★★★ John says he long argued that books, which resist multitasking, are the solution to a superficially distracted life, but now thinks he was wrong: the medium doesn't matter. (hedged) — 00:01:30
  • ★★ Quoting Faber's 'take it where you can find it', John thinks the 'it' is ideas offering sustenance and intellectual engagement, and such stories, in any medium, are not distracting. (hedged) — 00:02:00
  • ★★ John says this is not a call to prefer Beethoven to the Mountain Goats, noting Bradbury wrote in science fiction, a genre not traditionally associated with high-culture ideas. — 00:02:00 · The Mountain Goats

00:02:29 — Wallace's The Pale King on dullness and deeper pain; John checks his phone from fear of that pain; Fahrenheit 451 is about choosing distraction over engagement; boarding, sign-off

  • ★★★ John reads Wallace's The Pale King: dullness may hurt because it fails to distract us from a deeper, ambient pain, behind the 'terror of silence' of screens everywhere. (hedged) — 00:02:29
  • ★★★ John says that nearly every time he checks his phone it is from fear of feeling that deeper pain, and that to be engaged one must first overcome the fear of engagement. — 00:02:58
  • ★★★ For John, Fahrenheit 451 is ultimately not about censorship or television but about what happens when people choose distraction over engagement, and it was a wake-up call for him. — 00:03:27

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