Three marks of high-quality, enlightening media
Image by CCAC North Library
In one of the most poignant scenes from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, retired professor Faber makes the case for literature to Montag using a few key criteria (that apply also to film; podcasts; and, hey, news commentary!): it's all about “pores,” leisure, and the freedom to act.
"You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. … "It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the `parlour families' today [Editor's note: This refers to the world's four-walled interactive TV rooms]. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it … Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. … Three things are missing.
"Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. … The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
"So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. … Well, there we have the first thing I said we needed. Quality, texture of information."
"And the second?"
"Leisure."
"Oh, but we've plenty of off-hours."
"Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the fourwall televisor. Why? The televisor is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be, right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'"
"Only the 'family' is 'people.'"
"I beg your pardon?"
"My wife says books aren't 'real.'"
"Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, 'Hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours. As you see, my parlour is nothing but four plaster walls. And here " He held out two small rubber plugs. "For my ears when I ride the subway-jets."
"Denham's Dentifrice; they toil not, neither do they spin," said Montag, eyes shut [Editor's note: Two important allusions here. Earlier in Part II, on a train, Montag tries memorizing verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes but is bombarded by a noisy toothpaste jingle. Which highlights, we think, the conflict between subdue-able literature and un-beat-down-able entertainment ;-)]. "Where do we go from here? Would books help us?"
"Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the inter-action of the first two. …”
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