Reading Fahrenheit 451 with My 13-Year-Old

“Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he’s the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them. Look where they got you…” – Beatty to Montag, Fahrenheit 451

For many of us who didn’t vote for Trump, his first days holding the nation’s highest office have played out like a giant, but no less bruising, “Knew it. Told you so.” Straight out of the gate, President Trump has bound, gagged and slashed at so many of the resources vital to the health and the lifeblood of our swiftly-teetering democracy that he appears intent on watching America suffer a collective, fatal coronary.

Meanwhile, in addition to all this, tonight I’m also consumed with worry about a young girl named Clarisse.

My 13-year-old, Sam, and I are fifty pages from the end of Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 and we still have no idea what’s become of Clarisse, the teenager who jarred our main character, Montag, out of his dystopian stupor and asked him the right, necessary series of questions nudging him towards his massive awakening, into a hunger to live, to subvert the powers controlling society, and–not least of all–to read and preserve the books he’s spent his career obediently burning. In 451’s world, composed as it is of “alternative facts,” homes are now fireproof. A “fireman”–contrary to our understanding–follows alarm bells to the homes of individuals found to have disregarded the powers and have books in their possession. A fireman, in Bradbury’s stark dystopia, must burn away all the books and then also the people found to be harboring them, erasing evidence of any iconoclasts. Books, after all, unnecessarily challenge the mind and risk knocking a person from his or her unblinking, entirely-mediated and perpetual happiness.

We like Clarisse. She likes the taste of rain and picking dandelions and rubbing them under her chin to see if she’s in love. In the automated, numbed-out, and so-close-that-you-can-hear-it-coming future that Montag occupies–in a world stripped of privacy and at perpetual war and where homes airing “reality” programs feature televisions taking up entire walls–a spritely, free-spirited Clarisse appears to have momentarily found a way to engage and inhabit her life in a way that entirely eludes Montag.

In one of their final and most memorable conversations before she disappears, Clarisse informs Montag that she has to run to her appointment with a psychiatrist.“They” make her go to one, but not for the reasons we understand people typically go to psychiatrists. In the not-so-futuristic-anymore 451, Clarisse is sent to a psychiatrist because they want to know why she goes outdoors and hikes around forests, why she sits and watches birds and collects butterflies. They want to know what she does with all her unmediated free time. She tells them she sometimes just sits and thinks. In other words, her psychiatrist seems intent on figuring out why she revels in living idle and unplugged. Sometimes Clarisse tilts her head back, opens wide and lets the rain fall into her mouth. She asks Montag if he’s ever tried it. He hasn’t–it never occurred to him to try it. In fact, everything about Clarisse is mystifying and foreign to Montag– but curiously magnetizing, too–and so when she tells him that free falling rain tastes like wine to her, it confirms for Montag, on one hand, why she would need a psychiatrist.

And yet, before long, Montag–in his solitude, absent onlookers–is tilting his head back and opening his mouth to the rain.

But by page 30, Clarisse is gone. She’s vanished. And fifty pages from the end, the one bright star and free spirit in Bradbury’s dystopian classic has yet to reappear. Is she gone for good? Did they do her in as Montag fears?

We’re losing faith. And given recent weeks and events in real time, it’s made me reluctant to read on. I know I’m projecting a lot of my current anxieties onto the novel. So much so that for the first time in his thirteen years, I don’t look forward to reading at bedtime with Sam. For the first time in thirteen years, reading fiction at bedtime with Sam doesn’t feel like an escape, a reprieve from the day’s hulking stressors and concerns, but a loaded, compounded metaphor for pitch-perfectly illustrating a number of very present concerns.

***

It began harmlessly enough.

In September, I picked up Sam at cross-country practice and on the drive home he asked, “Pop, have you ever read Fahrenheit 451?”

I started to answer in the affirmative and then stopped myself.

Had I? I couldn’t remember. And then the fact that I couldn’t remember gave me further and longer pause.

Why couldn’t I remember? It’s the one about burning books, right? But what happens? Who are the characters? What’s the plot? And was this midlife equivalent of a “senior moment”? And why had no one prepared me for these?

I did what any parent does to save face in front of one’s children. I answered his question with a question:

“Why,” I asked.

He told me his teacher had mentioned it in class that day, adding, “She thought some of us might like it.”

In my senior year of college, a professor and I assembled a top-notch “Dystopian Literature” independent study that I know today proved one of the most engaging and memorable classes of my undergraduate degree pursuit. So engaging that today I can only partially recall the books I read for that course. While I firmly recollect reading 1984 and Brave New World that term, I can’t remember the other titles. Wasn’t there a Margaret Atwood novel in there? A Walker Percy book? Wasn’t Fahrenheit 451 in the stack, too?

I wracked my brain and couldn’t recall and this irritated me so much that we bought a copy and started reading it together at bedtime.

Perfect timing, too. Over the past year, as Sam has skyrocketed into adolescence, his rapidly changing tastes and flourishing independence have fired a curve ball at our bedtime reading ritual. For starters, during the time his little brother, Matt, and I work through some of the same novels and stories Sam and I read years ago–The Lord of the Rings, Narnia and Charlotte’s Web, for instance–Sam now reads on his own. Many recent nights then, by the time I’m done reading to Matt, Sam’s deep into a suspenseful scene of The Hunger Games or the Harry Potter series and is content to continue along on his own until lights out.

Also, while I can understand why the Hunger Games series and Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars make engaging reads for adolescents, they’re really not works that read aloud “musically” or that prove nearly as audibly delightful in the way Tolkien, Beowulf and E.B. White do.

So, in the past year, part of my challenge has been more about finding what to read together, rather than deciding whether it’s past time we stop reading altogether. We struck gold last year with Call of the Wild, and when a friend back East told me his daughter was grossing him and his wife out by reading aloud to them pages from Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma for Kids, I thought that’d be a good book for sparking conversation about topics worth considering together as a family.

But we recently hit a dry spell, until his teacher name-dropped Bradbury’s classic in school one afternoon, and so it seemed worth a shot.

We started reading it a few days before the election and it quickly dawned on me that I hadn’t read the novel after all.

And everything was fine, at first. We were reading it, we were curious. Bradbury’s strangely and nearly-believable version of the future at times recalled for me the tone and spirit of 1984. And, like I said, we liked Clarisse. We’ve held out hope and rooted for Montag, of course. But Clarisse is the kind of person you want to know. You want her to be that cool teen that ambles down the street now and then and positively influences your kids. I want to hire her to babysit Matt some night.

And then, well, Trump won the election.

***

Sam and his brother spend half the week at their mom’s and, depending on the night and where we leave off in the novel, I’ve been grateful for the space of a couple days between our readings. Somewhere between the nights I fly solo and Trump’s romp through his post-election victory tour, Bradbury’s art began to eerily and disturbingly resemble real life too, too much. So much so that rather than breeze into Sam’s room after my readings with Matt, I began to reluctantly lurch in his direction the way I slip into slower and slower motion in the distance between my car and Planet Fitness.

And Fahrenheit 451 continues hitting too close to home. So much so that my reading aloud sometimes slows to a snail’s pace, too.

Take the sinister monologue that Montag’s boss, Beatty, offers not long after Montag goes rogue and sneaks away from a burn job in the possession of a book. Suspecting Montag has something to hide, Beatty crawls through the history that has brought them to this moment in time:

“...With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers, instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar…We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone *made* equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy...A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute…”

Chilling words–“Breach man’s mind”–in not only the Trump era of “alternative facts,” but also as an instructor of Creative Writing for our local university’s English department. As we in Alaska witness the slash-and-burn of the humanities and arts programs during a period of “reprioritization” throughout our local university system, it’s too tempting right now to want to send Beatty’s passage to the friends, students and faculty members watching aghast from the sidelines as our disciplines are roundly gutted and devalued.

And yet, the reasons I’m often reluctant to return to 451 with Sam each night also prove the same reasons that can make it hard for me to put the book down once we’re thick into it. The suspense, the hope that Montag successfully comes out the other end of this bleak circumstance carries significant more heft than it might have if I were reading the novel a year or two ago. It’s a bit delusional, I know, but I can’t help feeling that if an oblivious cad like Montag can be jarred to life by lines of poetry or from the Bible then maybe there’s hope during our own darkening period that the same can happen here now in our time.

And even if Montag can’t change the world or successfully subvert the powers in the end, it seems that if Clarisse can somehow exist and thrive joyfully and unburdened in such a (sadly) believable era, absent the numbing agents, perhaps we can learn ways to bear up and thrive with our awareness intact.

At the same time, however, we wonder what’s happened to Clarisse. I know I’m projecting too much onto this character, but it suddenly feels necessary to believe that no matter what happens in dystopia, a person might still possess the freedom to walk around nature and think about nothing, to open one’s mouth to the rainfall, to revel in a simple dandelion. To laugh. “We must,” wrote the poet Jack Gilbert years ago, “have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.” Clarisse’s regard for life’s most simple gifts and beauties seems to embody Gilbert’s daring charge.

But then, while reading together a couple nights ago, the night before Sam headed to his mom’s for a couple days, we reached a passage that suggested we’ve perhaps hoped all this while, all these pages for naught.

Say it isn’t so, I thought. Can I go on reading? (Don’t worry - I won’t give you spoilers. You need to read Bradbury’s novel for yourself. Now more than ever.)

From my place reading on my back on Sam’s floor, head on a cushion, I set the novel on my chest and paused. I had the undeniable feeling that if what we had just read proved accurate, then I might not be able to accept Clarisse’s outcome. Not now. Not on the day, for instance, when Trump as President reminded us that he thinks “torture works,” or, too, a few days later when he enacts a ban on Muslims and refugees entering the country.

“Can we read more?” Sam asked, aghast.

I rubbed my eyes, exhausted and blue, and stared towards the ceiling.

“Not tonight,” I told him, closing the book.

He groaned and turned to set his clock alarm.

For hardly the first time in the slow weeks we’ve staggered through Bradbury’s classic, I couldn’t budge from my spot on the floor. Where might subversive, non-compliant individuals like Clarisse or Montag perhaps wind up in our volatile President’s America? I closed my hands over my quivering chest and breathed. Sam, from under his covers sat up in his bed and stared down at me.

“Good night, Papa.”

I sat up and then melted, slumped all of me into him like a lazing sloth or monkey–or an unconscious Will Ferrell–and then bombarded him with kisses around his cheeks, forehead and hair.

“Good night, buddy.”

I left his room and lumbered into mine, my head a dueling banjo routine of “What’s going to happen?” and “I don’t want to know!”

We’ll find out soon enough.

“You ask Why to a alot of things,” Beatty told Montag in one of his monologues, “and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it.”

That sinister fire chief’s got a point.

But, like Montag, some of us can’t stop asking Why. We’re asking Why for the same reason Montag finds himself sneaking a book away from the fire. Because we possess absolutely no other choice in the matter.