I'm going to invent a meme...
Oct. 22nd, 2009 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI just finished rereading Fahrenheit 451, which was perhaps my favorite book in middle school. I see it very differently now, and there is a lot I disagree with in the argument Bradbury is making through his story. But it is still powerful and affecting--it says something that fifteen years after the first time I read it, I still remember some scenes vividly.
Iin the introduction to the graphic novel adaptation, Bradbury asks his readers to name the book that they would memorize to save from the firemen and why. Without thinking about it too much, I know exactly what I would memorize: The poems of Wilfred Owen. These capture succinctly the futility and tragedy of war, what Owen called "the pity of war." They still ring true and are that type of poetry that make you think, if only more people heard this, perhaps they would not be so eager for war. (Also, they're short, and I don't have great faith in my powers of memorization.)
What would you save?
Iin the introduction to the graphic novel adaptation, Bradbury asks his readers to name the book that they would memorize to save from the firemen and why. Without thinking about it too much, I know exactly what I would memorize: The poems of Wilfred Owen. These capture succinctly the futility and tragedy of war, what Owen called "the pity of war." They still ring true and are that type of poetry that make you think, if only more people heard this, perhaps they would not be so eager for war. (Also, they're short, and I don't have great faith in my powers of memorization.)
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against his powers.
We laughed, knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars; when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death -- for Life; not men -- for flags.
--excerpt from "The Next War"
What would you save?
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-22 08:55 pm (UTC)- your favorite book that you would be personally be the saddest to see disappear
- what you consider to be the greatest book in existence (I'm sure that a lot of people would go with either the Bible or Shakespeare on this one)
- what single book you think would be most needed by a society with no books
The first two are both personal and in some ways, trivial. The third question? I don't know how to answer.
Would you want something that most encapsulated human knowledge? Or most encapsulated humanity? That made the best explicit argument for restarting the gathering of knowledge? That best demonstrated the power of the written word, to make people implicitly realize what they had lost? Or, as you've done, picked something that just beautifully drives home a single key message?
no subject
Date: 2009-10-23 04:46 pm (UTC)I was also thinking of it from a couple of angles. One is that books are the immortality of the writers--they are all they have left behind. In this case that is especially poignant, since Owen lived a very short time and died needlessly. And unlike the anonymous millions of others killed in WWI, he left behind a record of what his experience was like, that in some ways makes his life, and his suffering, worth something.
There's also that in F451, Bradbury holds up as a criteria for why books are important (or, rather, why books can be important), is that they show reality with all its flaws. And we need to see how things really are in order to make better decisions. Owen's poems capture the reality of the horror of his experience so perfectly, and he is often writing specifically to counter the patriotic glorification of martyring yourself for your country. So in that way, his work is very important, to show the lie of what we tell ourselves and our soldiers when we send them to war.
There's also that his poems move me. There are many things that move me, it's true, but it's not that common an occurence. So I can't help feeling that the world would have lost something important if these poems were no longer in it. And I was working on the assumption that there is a network of people memorizing books, as in F451, so Shakespeare and the Bible were covered.
And, of course, they're short. And poetry. I think I could memorize about 70 poems. There's no way I could memorize a work of prose longer than a page or so. I just can't do it. My first thought was to say Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism," but jesus christ that's long and dense and I would never remember it. Of course, if you're thinking about what would be most useful to a rebuilding society, technical manuals or scientific papers would probably be the most useful. But oblvndrgn beat me to that. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-23 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-22 09:14 pm (UTC)...and apparently I'm not as thoughtful as your commenter up there *laughs* but I think both of these pieces are my choices because of the great impact they both had on my development as a child, and as a creator myself.
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