"It was a pleasure to burn"

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 first made an impact on me many years ago. I first read it as what I thought was "simple" summer reading before my senior year of high school. Little did I know that this text would alter the way I percieve the world the rest of my life. As I have been reading our blog responses about F51, many of you talk about how you devored the book and could not put it down--I remember that exact same feeling as I read it for the first time. Fahrenheit 451 filled me with so many ideas, I remember not even knowing what to do with all the thoughts I had. I later had the opportunity to study Fahrenheit 451 at my undergraduate instituation with a prominent Science Fiction scholar--and it made my reading almost etheral. But even after all these years of reading and studying Fahrenheit 451 nothing brings chills to my bones like the prose Bradbury wrote in the very first pages of his novel:


It was a pleasure to burn.



It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparking whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.



Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by the flame.
He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.

I appreciate how Bradbury plays with images that we percieve to be so simplistic in their nature--images like fires, firemen and the equipment they use and works with and manipulates those images using such powerful description thus creating a whole new level of interpretation for his readers. In a novel about banning books, Bradbury shows us within the first page just how powerful words can be...and for that I am eternally grateful.