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Feeling More Alive: Fahrenheit 451's The Hearth and the Salamander

2012-07-10 · John · watch on YouTube · Books & writing · explainer learning

For the Nerdfighter Book Club, John reads Part One of Fahrenheit 451 as a book in which everyone is both alive and dead, notes how Bradbury's predictions about mass media came true, and asks when we feel least like we are wasting our lives.

What is said

00:00:00 — Part One: Guy Montag the book-burning fireman, Mildred, the mechanical hound and snake: everything is both alive and dead; technology has pulverized nature

  • ★ In the description John notes that educational videos are allowed to run over four minutes by extensive precedent. — 00:00:00 · Four-minute rule
  • ★★★ John says that in Fahrenheit 451 everything is both alive and dead: the mechanical hound, Montag's mausoleum-like house, his wife Mildred, and the snake-like machine that saves her after a suicide attempt. — 00:00:47
  • ★★ John says the book's people never really live: Mildred lives vicariously through mindless entertainment she forgets within minutes, firemen live for cheap thrills, and Mildred and Guy can't remember how they met. — 00:00:57
  • ★★ John reads the fighter jets that seem to 'pulverise the stars' as a clear message: technology has pulverized our nature. (hedged) — 00:01:17

00:01:21 — Clarisse reconnects Montag with nature ('taste the rain' wrestler aside), disappears like a manic pixie dream girl; Montag starts collecting books

  • ★★ John says Clarisse shakes Montag out of his thoughtless life, reintroducing him to nature until he literally tastes the rain, then disappears, presumably dead, like a manic pixie dream girl. — 00:01:21
  • ★ John says Clarisse has already changed Montag: he is collecting books he ought to burn, threatening his career and his life. — 00:02:01

00:02:08 — Dystopian fiction comes true (Hunger Games aside); historical context: Bradbury's rented typewriter, TV in the 1950s vs today; the change came from us, not the government

  • ★★ John says dystopian fiction has a way of coming true, and Fahrenheit 451 is perhaps the most dramatic example in our literature. — 00:02:08
  • ★★ John says Ray Bradbury wrote the book in a library on a typewriter rented for 20 cents an hour. — 00:02:25
  • ★★ John says that when Bradbury wrote, only about a million American households had televisions, and for several hours a day nothing was on TV in most markets. — 00:02:30
  • ★★ John says today the average American watches 150 hours of TV a month, and the average American household, like Montag's, has more TVs than people. — 00:02:44
  • ★★ John says we go outside far less than in Bradbury's day, often with earbuds instead of birdsong, and though we don't burn books we read fewer every year. — 00:02:53
  • ★★★ John says Bradbury predicted these changes and, quoting Captain Beatty, that the change didn't come from the government down: we made the world we live in, not some all-powerful other. — 00:03:05

00:03:18 — A novel of ideas that John loves because it is unsettling: superficial browsing, sustained attention, and when we feel least like we are wasting our lives; invitation to comment

  • ★★ John calls Fahrenheit 451 an old-fashioned novel of ideas, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull or The Fountainhead, a kind of book that usually annoys him because it isn't really about its story. (hedged) — 00:03:18
  • ★★★ John says that although he finds Clarisse totally unconvincing, he really loves the book because it is profoundly unsettling. — 00:03:32
  • ★★★ John asks whether we have replaced intellectual engagement with superficial browsing, and whether sustained attention is possible amid distractions, where a CSI episode can be rewatched unrecognized. — 00:03:39
  • ★★★ John reframes the question as when we feel least like we are wasting our lives; nature doesn't make him feel alive, but conversations with family and friends about things that matter do. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ John says he'd like to know what viewers thought of the book and what makes their lives feel meaningful, to continue the conversation in comments. — 00:04:16 · Nerdfighteria

00:04:25 — Sign-off; P.S. Crash Course World History episode on slavery and last week's cinnamon challenge

  • ★★ John says the new Crash Course World History episode is about the complicated story of slavery, and last week he did the cinnamon challenge while discussing the Columbian Exchange. — 00:04:29 · Crash Course

Humor (significant)

  • John introduces Fahrenheit 451 by its title temperature, then corrects himself: it is the temperature at which books burn. — 00:00:03 > «the famous temperature at which love boils.»
  • Introducing Clarisse, the teenager who sees everything clearly, John puns on her name. — 00:01:26 > «this beautiful teenager who sees everything Clear-ice-ly.»
  • John muses that 'taste the rain' would be a catchphrase if he became a professional wrestler named The Rain. — 00:01:45 > «Get ready to taste The Rain!»
  • Since dystopian fiction tends to come true, John wants it on record now what he will do if there is ever a Hunger Games. — 00:02:12 > «I will not be volunteering as tribute on your behalf.»
  • Unlike Clarisse, John likes nature but it doesn't make him feel alive. — 00:03:58 > «it mostly makes me feel super conscious of the fact that mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus.»

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