Fahrenheit 451 pp. 68-80

Hello (doesn’t that familiar greeting get boring?).
Laura Mitchell asked me if I thought this book holds all the answers. She asked it in jest, but I really think that it does. It asks a lot of fundamental questions about happiness and what we need to be happy. It also shows that you can talk for hours—your whole life—and never say a thing, because if you never say anything of value, then you have, in effect, said nothing. I am a lover of books. I just am. I think that this isn’t something that I was born with, but my mother is a bibliophile, I was taught to love books and I really love THIS book, because, though it is about burning books, which sounds contradictory, it’s really about the importance of books and what they hold. This is something that I firmly believe.
One of the things that saddens me the most is people who defile books. I know that there is at least one book in Mr. Janna’s classroom that has been written in. Today I brought a book to school and someone thought that it would be fine with me to write on it. I can't even express how angry that made me. People write in library books, they throw them off of buildings, and think nothing of turning down the corners. Call me a traditional, old lady, but I think that we are on the path to burning books. We have already lost all respect for them.
I have nothing more to say on the topic that I haven’t already said and I don’t want to bore anyone.

I would like to discuss the sieve analogy that can be found on page 78, paragraph three. I found this comparison interesting for several reasons.
The first of these is because of what I take it to mean. They way I see it, Montag is comparing his experience with the sieve at the beach to the idea that if he read the bible fast enough that not all of the words would drain out of the sieve of his mind and he could hold them there long enough to comprehend them. First, I really like the description of his experience with the sieve. Especially the part where he is talking about how he did it for a dime, the sound the sand made and how hot it was. But the other thing I like about this sense of urgency and the knowledge that no matter how fast you fill a sieve, it will always leak out.
The second reason I like this is because of the way that the symbol is, in a way, symbolic of something else. I think that it is also describing what his society is like. Everyone is rushing round, hurrying, hurrying, hurrying, but no matter what they do, all of the sand drains out of the sieve and they are left with nothing.
Goodbye (another of those tiresome, old endings).