The Power to Read

I've been having an obsession of books over the past week. Books have been on my mind, they are usually on my mind, but this week they have been more so. I am amazed at the power of what the written word can do to a person. Books can inspire, they can change your perspective, they can take you away. A single sentence in a book can be magical if an author knows how to use it the right way, I would compare it to a sequence or a shot in a movie that could have that same effect. Words when brought together in a certain way can become poetry.

I haven't gotten the written word and how important it really is until only recently, there's something special in wanting to read, I think it is a need in all of us, to learn something more. Perhaps the best book I can think of on the importance of books that I have ever read is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The book takes place in a not too distant future where reading has become outlawed, people have become slaves to prescription drugs and television. The fire department are no longer people who fight fires, but actually are the ones who are sent to burn books hidden by other people, the temperature a book needs to be at to burn is 451 hence the title. I read the book about five years ago and I still remember it, just recently I saw the film version for the first time which was directed by one of my favorite director's Francois Truffaut.

For anyone who knows anything about Truffaut, he loved books as much as he loved films. His version of Fahrenheit 451 is less a science fiction story than it is a love letter to the written word. In the most touching scene, the hero, a fireman named Montag opens a book for the first time to see what it is he sets on fire. In the scene you can see the exhilaration felt for opening the book and reading those words on the page, it's poetry in motion which to me is what a great film does. It also didn't hurt that the book Montag chose to read was Dickens' "David Copperfield", which if people who pay attention to this blog was my first Dickens book I ever read, and it brought me back to the time when I opened that book for the first time and read that first sentence, so on that note the film connected to me on a very personal level.

After viewing the film, I started looking at my library of books that I still had to read, I picked one out at random, it was "Moby Dick", which I'm in the middle of right now, and find it hard sometimes to put down.

I often wonder if the power of reading is getting lost somewhere in today's world. Sometimes I don't feel that way, I remember when every child was reading some "Harry Potter" book, it made me glad that they were reading even something. But still there is that nagging feeling that reading has become out of date, and too many people refer to people on television for their information. These are the people I hold contempt for, they use words, but they twist them in a way meant to confuse from the real point. To them, words are used as fear tactics and steer the viewer away from the truth. Just recently there was an uproar for the United States' new healthcare plan. The opposers of the bill tried to twist the words of that in order to make something out of it that wasn't there, to the public's credit, they didn't buy it, and this is what gives me hope.

I wonder how close we are to Bradbury's vision of the future, or if actually outlawing the written word will ever become illegal, I don't ever see it going that far, personally I think I would be lost without it, books helps us in sharing our human experience, they can bring us back to feelings we have felt before, and they can make us feel a little less lonely when we are alone. I know I can be alone for hours with a book I love, yet it would feel as if time had stood still. I think this is why I try to write in this blog as much as I can, it's trying to communicate something through the written word, isn't it wonderful to be able to express something that way?