Fahrenheit 451. The temperature needed for paper to spontaneously combust. The title of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel published in 1953.

The title of a book about censorship, a book about the attempt to destroy any form of human creativity, art and expression.

A book about the capacity to not let go of our history, about the need to remember, to not let what made us be destroyed.

A story of awakening, of the spirit that cannot be suppressed, though it might be beaten and wounded and forced to hide in the dark.

A story of love.

...It takes place in an unspecified future time in a hedonistic and rabidly anti-intellectual America that has completely abandoned self-control and bans the reading of books. Anyone caught owning them is, at the minimum, confined in a mental hospital and has the books confiscated and burned. At the maximum, the penalty is a sentence to immediate death. People are now only entertained by in-ear radio and an interactive form of television. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman, certain that his job—burning books, and the houses that hold them, and persecuting those who own them—is the right thing to do…

The rest will be up to you to read.

What’s funny, or maybe scary, is the fact that if you take the time to look around the internet for keywords like: banned books, censored books, …, you get lists of masterpieces, books that are columns of concepts we are usually proud of, like freedom of thought and speech.

The funny, or scary, or sad part of these lists is that they don’t come from Iran, Northern Korea or the Third Reich, they are often from the United States, and many other free countries.

Not that there’s an official censorship organ (not that we know of at least...), but the simple fact that a school would think of banning books from a library, for any reason, is revolting.

And when the banned books are ones like the one I’m talking about it’s hard not to smell burning paper, and not to remember the piles of books set on fire by men in brown shirts just over half a century ago. Take a look at the links:

http://www.banned-books.com/bbarticle-miss.html

http://www.georgesuttle.com/censorship/censors-all.shtml

A mature and free society deals with dangerous thoughts by discussing them, by finding ways to deal with them, not by hiding and banning. Those are methods we should never even dream of using.

Read Fahrenheit 451, and you’ll be doing your little share in keeping culture free.