On Sept. 9, Apple is scheduled to host a media event in San Francisco, where the company is expected to unveil an updated line of iPod media players. Coincidentally, I have just finished teaching an online interdisciplinary studies class, wherein we read a selection from Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451.
Two years before Steve Jobs was born, Ray Bradbury predicted the I-pod, only he called it Seashells, “radios in the ear that fill every minute with pop music and idle talk.” (Marvin Perry, Humanities in the Western Tradition: Readings in Literature and Thought, p. 290).
Montag's wife Mildred wears two of them, to keep a painful reality at bay:
The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough so he could follow the tune.
Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed in the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time
At another point, Captain Beatty explains how Montag’s job works—why firemen burn books:
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”
(From Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Published by Doubleday in 1953. )
Indeed, Captain Beatty, it does!
Two years before Steve Jobs was born, Ray Bradbury predicted the I-pod, only he called it Seashells, “radios in the ear that fill every minute with pop music and idle talk.” (Marvin Perry, Humanities in the Western Tradition: Readings in Literature and Thought, p. 290).
Montag's wife Mildred wears two of them, to keep a painful reality at bay:
The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough so he could follow the tune.
Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed in the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time
At another point, Captain Beatty explains how Montag’s job works—why firemen burn books:
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”
(From Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Published by Doubleday in 1953. )
Indeed, Captain Beatty, it does!
1 comment:
that was really interesting and true, we fill so much of our life up with white noise, intertainment, mindless time, we fail to stop and think about what we are doing or what it says about our priorities.
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