Those are the words of the old, out-of-print science fiction author Kilgore Trout, right at the end of the ten year rerun that is the basis for the book Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut.
The premise of Timequake is that the Universe got bored with expanding all the time. “What is the point?” It asked itself. So it stopped expanding, and contracted for a while. On Earth, everyone is flashed back to a point 10 years earlier, and are forced to relive the previous 10 years of their lives. They make the same bad decisions, they do all the exact same things, and can’t help it. They have all their memories of the last 10 years, so they know what is coming. This results in everyone going on what Trout calls “autopilot,” since everyone knows what is coming next, they don’t have to think about it.
For me, this would be a combination of a great time and torture. Like everyone else (I’m sure), I’ve done a lot of things that I’m embarrassed about, but the last 10 years for me include college, high school and seventh and eighth grade. Some good times and some bad; I won’t get into it here.
Early on in the book, Vonnegut writes a little bit about his opinion on TV. He says that it was ok a long time ago, when there were very few shows and people would get out and discuss them, but it expanded to the point where nobody is watching the same thing and nobody talks to other people.
I didn’t catch this while reading the book, but after I read it (and the more I thought about it), Vonnegut uses the timequake as an allegory for TV. The previous 10 years of everyone’s life is like a bad TV show they are re-watching. People realize that they can’t do anything about it, so they all just stop thinking. Studies have shown that there is less brain activity in someone who is watching TV than someone who is sleeping, and Vonnegut shows people forgot how to think during the timequake. As soon as the rerun ends (the Universe expands back to where it was), everyone who was standing on one leg when the timequake hit falls over. This is pretty common because many people were mid-stride while walking around. He even gives an example of a man who was driving a truck, and when the rerun ended, he crashed into a building because he didn’t realize he had to think about what he was doing.
This book gives me chills because of how reflective of our society it actually is. I have a pretty extreme example, but I think it’s exactly what Vonnegut was getting at. I lived with a guy whose drivers license said he weighed 290 pounds, but he had to have weighed closer to 350 or maybe even more than that. The reason for his weight was that he sat on the couch for thirteen (I wrote it out so you’d know it’s not a typo) thirteen hours every day. He set his alarm for 9:30 AM, so he could waddle over to the living room and channel surf all day long. He did leave the apartment to go to class, work, and broomball; but those are the only reasons he left. Occasionally, my other roommates and I would use the living room while he was in class, and when he got back and found the TV in use, he had no idea what to do with himself. He had become dependent on TV.
This of course is an extreme example, but it is not uncommon for people not to know what to do without TV’s or computers. When I went to my grandparent’s cabin last weekend, I brought a few good books to read in case it rained, and I spent the entire time outside exploring the woods, swimming, or having a fire; not being anti-social in front of a screen the entire time.
This book is similar to Fahrenheit 451 in that it is heavily critical of TV, and it shows how people are thinking less because the TV is doing it for them. People don't know how to entertain themselves, they don't know how to interact, because there's no need: We have TV instead.
Timequake on Amazon.com
ISBN # 0425164349
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Friday, July 30, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury is the second incarnation of HG Wells. Most of Wells’ books were a social commentary of some kind (I don’t like British imperialism, so how would they like it if Martians imperialized them? What would happen to our current class structure over 800,000 years? Etc.). Fahrenheit 451 is a commentary on censorship and the amount of reading people do these days.
The book is the story of Guy Montag, who is a fireman. It is his job to start fires. He starts books on fire, because books are banned. The reason for banning books is that the smart people made the dumb people feel dumb, so they banned the books, burned as many as they could, and now they have firemen whose job it is to burn down the houses of people who are hiding books. The result is a world where people essentially watch TV all day every day. Montag’s wife Mildred spends most of her time in their parlor, where TV’s fill up three of the four walls. On these TV’s are her “families,” it sounds like they are just soap operas that she watches all day that she can interact with in really small ways (they had a chip installed that makes the characters say “Mrs. Montag” instead of “Paying customer” whenever they are talking to her. It makes her even more involved with it). These parlors with TV’s covering the walls are very common in this world. One woman, when discusses having children says that “having children is like doing laundry! You just throw them in the parlor and give them some clean clothes every now and then!” This may not sound realistic, but I believe it does happen on occasion in our society. I lived with a guy who weighed over 300 pounds, and the reason was that he sat on the couch for thirteen hours every day watching TV. He also had the personality of a little kid, which is another characteristic of the people living in Fahrenheit 451: they don’t really get what is real and what is not. They don’t thing the characters in books could be real because they can’t see them, but the people on their walls are real because they see and “interact” with them.
So why do we care about Montag so much? Early on in the book, he meets a girl named Clarisse, who basically introduces him to the world. She asks all the silly questions, and just observes people. Eventually she dies, or something. I don’t really know. I wish Bradbury had explained what happened to her or had her come back at the end. In Montag’s hero’s journey, she serves as the mentor, which is the character that sends our hero on (in this case) his quest. Montag’s quest is to stop “killing” authors by burning their works. After he burns down a house, he realizes that every time he burns a book, he is killing the author in a small way. He makes that connection when he burns down a house that has a woman still inside it. It horrifies him so much that he begins to wonder what is in the books that is worth dying for. Long story short, he finds that books are wonderful, except when they are banned and get his house burned down.
Montag’s discovery of books leads him to betray his fireman friends, and he is eventually exiled from society because of his bookish ways. Lucky for him, right after he leaves the city, there is a huge (and short) war that annihilates the city he just lived in. The hobo’s he ends up with are all book nerds, and they have developed a way to recollect any book they have read at least once. They are Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dostoevsky, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They preserved all the books between all the hobo’s in the country. Montag is the book of Ecclesiastes and Revelation.
Bradbury probably chose the book of Ecclesiastes to be ironic, because the book is about how work is meaningless, although having wisdom is the best way to live. For example, chapter 1 verse 2 states:
This ties in with the end of Fahrenheit 451 when the literature nerds were saying that humans will always go through repeated Dark Ages and Renaissance’s, and their job is to preserve the wisdom that the books have. Also in chapter 1, (verse 18):
This is passage is true for Montag and the other nerds because they are sorrowful for the civilization that is lost at the end of the book, whereas all the people living in it were indifferent because they had lost touch with what was real and what was just on their TV. Next week I’ll be discussing Kurt Vonnegut’s opinions of TV in a review of Timequake.
Fahrenheit 451 on Amazon.com
ISBN # 0345342968
Ray Bradbury is the second incarnation of HG Wells. Most of Wells’ books were a social commentary of some kind (I don’t like British imperialism, so how would they like it if Martians imperialized them? What would happen to our current class structure over 800,000 years? Etc.). Fahrenheit 451 is a commentary on censorship and the amount of reading people do these days.
The book is the story of Guy Montag, who is a fireman. It is his job to start fires. He starts books on fire, because books are banned. The reason for banning books is that the smart people made the dumb people feel dumb, so they banned the books, burned as many as they could, and now they have firemen whose job it is to burn down the houses of people who are hiding books. The result is a world where people essentially watch TV all day every day. Montag’s wife Mildred spends most of her time in their parlor, where TV’s fill up three of the four walls. On these TV’s are her “families,” it sounds like they are just soap operas that she watches all day that she can interact with in really small ways (they had a chip installed that makes the characters say “Mrs. Montag” instead of “Paying customer” whenever they are talking to her. It makes her even more involved with it). These parlors with TV’s covering the walls are very common in this world. One woman, when discusses having children says that “having children is like doing laundry! You just throw them in the parlor and give them some clean clothes every now and then!” This may not sound realistic, but I believe it does happen on occasion in our society. I lived with a guy who weighed over 300 pounds, and the reason was that he sat on the couch for thirteen hours every day watching TV. He also had the personality of a little kid, which is another characteristic of the people living in Fahrenheit 451: they don’t really get what is real and what is not. They don’t thing the characters in books could be real because they can’t see them, but the people on their walls are real because they see and “interact” with them.
So why do we care about Montag so much? Early on in the book, he meets a girl named Clarisse, who basically introduces him to the world. She asks all the silly questions, and just observes people. Eventually she dies, or something. I don’t really know. I wish Bradbury had explained what happened to her or had her come back at the end. In Montag’s hero’s journey, she serves as the mentor, which is the character that sends our hero on (in this case) his quest. Montag’s quest is to stop “killing” authors by burning their works. After he burns down a house, he realizes that every time he burns a book, he is killing the author in a small way. He makes that connection when he burns down a house that has a woman still inside it. It horrifies him so much that he begins to wonder what is in the books that is worth dying for. Long story short, he finds that books are wonderful, except when they are banned and get his house burned down.
Montag’s discovery of books leads him to betray his fireman friends, and he is eventually exiled from society because of his bookish ways. Lucky for him, right after he leaves the city, there is a huge (and short) war that annihilates the city he just lived in. The hobo’s he ends up with are all book nerds, and they have developed a way to recollect any book they have read at least once. They are Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dostoevsky, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They preserved all the books between all the hobo’s in the country. Montag is the book of Ecclesiastes and Revelation.
Bradbury probably chose the book of Ecclesiastes to be ironic, because the book is about how work is meaningless, although having wisdom is the best way to live. For example, chapter 1 verse 2 states:
2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."
This ties in with the end of Fahrenheit 451 when the literature nerds were saying that humans will always go through repeated Dark Ages and Renaissance’s, and their job is to preserve the wisdom that the books have. Also in chapter 1, (verse 18):
18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
This is passage is true for Montag and the other nerds because they are sorrowful for the civilization that is lost at the end of the book, whereas all the people living in it were indifferent because they had lost touch with what was real and what was just on their TV. Next week I’ll be discussing Kurt Vonnegut’s opinions of TV in a review of Timequake.
Fahrenheit 451 on Amazon.com
ISBN # 0345342968
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