Fahrenhiet 452 pp. 40-68

Hello.
A man by the name of Allan Bloom once wrote a book called “The Closing of the American Mind”. In it he describes, at one point, his own reading habits, saying that a good book causes you to pace around the room, make lists and reference other books, pulling them off the bookshelf and searching fervidly for passages. It was a very active sense of reading, and I wish that I could find the passage, but not having read the book myself, it think it is lost until I pick it up. My point in all of this is that books, good ones, at least, make you think. This is a really good book and I have thought for a long time about it.
A few things happened in this part of the book that I would like to draw attention to, slightly taking on my role, as Austin Cook said, of explaining the book “for dummies”. I personally think that none of you are dummies, but everyone gets confused (me too) and so I thought I would just recap before answering the questions.
Montag goes to a woman’s house and burns her and her books. In the process, however, he steals one and hides it in his own house. One of the interesting things that Daniel brought more sharply to my attention was what the woman said when they first were trying to burn her house. She said, “Play the man, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust it shall never be put out.” She says this, as Beatty explains, because of two men who were burnt at the stake for hearsay (second hand information) and she is being burnt for owning books, which is a type of hearsay, I suppose. I think of books more as part of the quest for knowledge (and a wonderful form of entertainment, though putting them in that category seems almost criminal), which might have been what the man, “Master Ridley”, was burnt for as well.
Beatty explains a bit how books went out of fashion. He tells Montag that it was not the government, but the people, who grew upset with books, especially referring to minorities. The minorities didn’t like the books about minorities, especially Beatty references “Little Black Sambo”.
Also, he says, books made people unhappy because they made them think. Let me say right now that if you are not appalled by the state of things in the world today, you haven’t been thinking, but some people would rather be ignorant and happy. Books made people think, and they didn’t want to have to look at their own ugliness, the ugliness of the human race. The solution? Stop reading; start burning the books you don’t like. Well, lets say I don’t like this book, you don’t like that one and someone dislikes a third. What’s left? Nothing.
Beatty calls Montag and the other firemen the “Happiness Boys”. He says this because he believes that he is preserving people’s happiness. By keeping books out of people’s hands, he is keeping them from thinking about things that would, he believes, eventually make them unhappy.
But I have this question to pose: was the woman with her books, who was burned with her books, unhappy?
Here is my answer, though I am sure you’ll have different ones. No. She wasn’t unhappy. She was enlightened. In a way, her burning was a silent protest, I think. She knew what was happening to the world, she had broken through the illusion, in a “Matrix”-like escape. In “The Matrix” everyone is part of this computer program, and when Neo, the protagonist, finds this out, he doesn’t want to—or perhaps can’t—go back to living in a web of lies. I see the woman like that. She has seen everything from the outside and couldn’t allow herself to go into custody where she would have to submit herself to that lie again. That’s how I see it.
Now I would like to ask another question. Does this book make you think? Does it make you unhappy? It should. I am speaking to the people out there who have never picked up a book of their own free will. It should be making you think, it should be making you pace around the room and make lists.
It’s a good book.
Goodbye.