Woman Burns Herself With Her Books by Paul Kieniewicz

In his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury describes a scene where a woman sets fire to herself while standing on a pile of forbidden books, a shattering scene captured in Francois Truffaut’s film of the same name.

We’re in a dystopian future where all books are banned, because they cause people to think. All information is transmitted by TV, closely controlled and monitored.

She doesn’t speak a word while she strikes the match, but her action, you can watch it here, makes one of the firemen start thinking. He starts collecting forbidden books and reading them.

Later on, he encounters people who are preserving the world’s literature by committing entire books to memory.

Why read books, specifically literature? Why not just watch webinars or listen to podcasts? The difference is between eating raw food or swallowing what is prepared for you. If you want to develop independent thinking, don’t listen to material pre-stuffed with other people’s opinions and theories. There’s a difference in the way you process material when you read or listen to a webinar. Listening to a webinar, you are mostly passive, absorbing what comes at you. Quite often, you’ll have forgotten most of it a few days later.

However, reading the words, you’re an active participant, looking closely at the images or ideas that you read.

The difference is even greater when reading literature over watching a movie version. Reading it, you can enter into the images, the characters, their feelings, the situations presented by the author. You can explore dimensions and facets that necessarily are left out of a movie version, often out of commercial considerations. Reading literature can help you explore your own inner spaces and dimensions.

It may not make you rich, but you can sure get to know yourself.

In Fahrenheit 451, we are never told why the woman burned herself with her books. All we have to guide us is her expression of acceptance, defiance. However, what she did sure made an impact, on those watching, changed their lives.

The ability of books to stimulate independent thinking was not lost on Aldous Huxley, in whose Brave New World books were banned also.

However, the architect of that society, Mustapha Mond, kept a safe full of classic literature so that he could avail himself of their riches.

Here is the scene between the Controller and the Savage, protagonist of the novel.

The Controller, meanwhile, had crossed to the other side of the room and was unlocking a large safe let into the wall between the bookshelves. The heavy door swung open. Rummaging in the darkness within, "It's a subject," he said, "that has always had a great interest for me." He pulled out a thick black volume. "You've never read this, for example."
The Savage took it. "The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments" he read aloud from the title-page.
"Nor this." It was a small book and had lost its cover.
"The Imitation of Christ."
"Nor this." He handed out another volume. "The Varieties of Religious Experience. By William James."
"And I've got plenty more," Mustapha Mond continued, resuming his seat. "A whole collection of pornographic old books. God in the safe and Ford on the shelves." He pointed with a laugh to his avowed library—to the shelves of books, the racks full of reading-machine bobbins and sound-track rolls.
"But if you know about God, why don't you tell them?" asked the Savage indignantly. "Why don't you give them these books about God?"
"For the same reason as we don't give them Othello: they're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now."
"But God doesn't change."
"Men do, though."
"What difference does that make?"
"All the difference in the world," said Mustapha Mond…