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| image from Truffaut's movie of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 |
In Fahrenheit 451, you predicted shallow stories on flat-screen televisions that made people drift away from books. You predicted people so caught up in their portable media that they forgot to interact with others. And you showed us how easy it is to conform to a mass media.
You did not live to see book treasures 5000 years old, along with modern-era poetry, novels, scientific works, health treatises, unapproved religious works, and more make a huge bonfire of the vanities, lit by those who taught their world that culture, civilization, and science were evils. Such men would burn your books and mine, and obliterate even Shakespeare. You did not live to hear that hiding books and precious manuscripts meant death.
And when you were alive and dreamed all culture burned, you dreamed the fire happened in America, but about the place you were wrong.
