Farenheit 451

It is the temperature at which paper burns.

I read the book (many moons ago) and just finished watching the HBO special. As usual, Michael B. Jordan did an excellent job of portraying a man with two opposing ideologies battling within him, all using the smallest shifts in his expressions. As movies do, it wasn’t able to explore the depth of what Ray Bradbury gave us, but it was still an enjoyable Sunday evening watch.

The book was impactful for me because while I’d always read, I did not have a clear understanding at the time why I did. I didn’t realize the wealth of information, the exchange of ideas, and how it all can shape our perspectives of ourselves and the world around us.

With each flame to paper, I cringed a little bit. Not simply because I am a writer, but because of the difficulty in writing. The difficulty in conveying thoughts, building worlds, creating human beings so tangible we can feel the flush of their flesh when they stand too close to the heat. If creativity is life, then writing is its incubus, taking until you’re nothing but a relic, a drained literary corpse; a masochist because even without recovery, you thirst to wash-rinse-repeat.

We are in a Golden Age. With the internet at our fingertips, the vast amount of information available to us should make us seek more knowledge, thirst for the unknown, for things we never knew we could conceive.

Alex