Fahrenheit 451

Let me tell you two secrets about Fahrenheit 451.

1. This is a novel about fire, but what color IS fire? Your first answer of course, is red. But the word “red” appears in the novel a mere eight times. By way of prismatic contrast, the word “black” appears 52 times, and “white” flashes across the pages 36 times. Although Bradbury wrote this novel in the 1950s, it was published in technicolor: the word “green” takes the third-place spot with 25 appearances, and our perennially healthy “pink,” “blue,” “yellow,” and “orange” appear 10 to 14 times each.

Check out this ode to “white”:

 Describing Clarisse: “Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting.”

 Describing Mildred: “Her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall; but it felt no rain; over which clouds might pass their moving shadows, but she felt no shadow.”

And the many shades of “grey”:

 “He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys, and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night frightened faces, like grey animals peering from electric caves, faces with grey colorless eyes, grey tongues and grey thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face.”

And of course, the eloquent mash-ups:

 “It bedded itself down in sleepy pink-grey cinders and a smoke plume blew over it, rising and waving slowly back and forth in the sky.”

 “He was trembling, and his face was green-white.”

2. This novel is about fire, sure, but it’s also about water. We all know Montag escapes the heart-pounding chase of the diabolical Mechanical Hound by jumping into the river, leaving his signature scent in the dust, and floating downstream to freedom. We all know he emerges from the river a new man, a changed man, that he is new-baptized by the healing power of purification. Water channels his passage through to his new life:

 “The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood.”

But what happens when you mix fire and water? Do they cancel each other out? Nope. Fire plus water equals wine, of course.

 “He would be Montag-plus-Faber, fire plus water, and then, one day, after everything had mixed and simmered and worked away in silence, there would be neither fire nor water, but wine. Out of two separate and opposite things, a third.”

Apparently, opposites don’t necessarily consume one another to oblivion. Instead, they create something new, something whole and sacramental. Both fire and water can paradoxically destroy and purify. Mix them together, and they conquer everlasting thirst.

Take-Away: As we head into the decade of the 2020s, Fahrenheit 451 was never so necessary to read. Bradbury predicted AirPods, flat screen media walls, virtual reality, and even my new reality: TV school with TV teachers. His most important lesson is that we have only ourselves to blame for the great dumbing down of society. This book is awash with color and kindles with symbolism. Stoke the fire, people: READ!