Making order out of chaos

I came across this picture as I was sorting through some old photos on my computer:

This is me on my third birthday, enjoying some new crayons and a colouring book:

Me and my new crayons.

I’m 36 now, but I haven’t changed in some respects: I still find a great deal of fun in (supposedly) childish things: splashing through puddles, getting filthy, eating junk food for breakfast, reading fairy tales, etc. I also still like the few stuffed animals that I’ve managed to keep with me through well over 20 moves (and the few I’ve bought myself as an adult, too, but who could say no to plush toast?).

And while some of the things I loved as a kid are maybe not quite as fun  - especially the stomachaches from eating potato chips for breakfast – the one thing I still like just as much now as I did when I was little, are colouring books. The smell of Crayola crayons is a time machine for me; all I have to do is open the box, and I can see my younger self sprawled on on the floor, crayons spread out on the carpet, while I dedicated myself to the seriously fun business of colouring pictures.

I own a couple of colouring books now that are clearly aimed at children: simple pictures, lots of big spaces, and everything in ” jumbo” format (and they are Christmas-themed books, as they always seem the most fun to colour). And, because my fine motor skills have improved greatly since my third birthday, I’ve moved on from the jumbo crayons in the picture above, to a set of extremely nice Faber-Castell pencils, and beautiful stained glass colouring books.

These gorgeous books are printed by Dover Publications. The pictures are printed on translucent paper, with bold outlines, and can be coloured on both sides (or just one) and they look fantastic hanging in a window when you’re finished colouring them.

Recently, I indulged myself and bought one of the Christmas stained glass colouring books, and sat down with a glass of wine, and coloured this:

St. Nicholas with toys.

I feel safe in saying that the picture of St. Nicholas is a vast improvement upon anything I coloured as a three year old.

I love that there are companies like Dover Publications who make colouring books for adults; it means never having to give up being a kid – not entirely.

Not that I was going to anyway.

Title: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages: 190 (incl. afterword and interview)
ISBN: 0-345-34296-8
Price: $7.99 (CDN)

When I first read Fahrenheit 451, I was in grade nine, and though I liked it, I was too young and inexperienced a reader (and person) to get much more than the basics of the plot from it. When I tried again in university, I abandoned the protagonist, Guy Montag, and his wife, Mildred, in their parlour, hashing it out over the books Guy had been secreting away in the duct work. Finally, in October of last year, while visiting with my grandparents in Stratford, Ontario, I saw a copy of the 50th anniversary paperback of Fahrenheit 451 sitting on the shelf in Fanfare Books and I bought it (my previous copy was lost in one of my many moves all over Ontario) and tried reading it again.

The third time was the charm; this time, I really read it. I didn’t just skim it, I didn’t turn the pages and let osmosis do the rest, I really read it. I really thought about what I was reading, and the more attention I paid to the words and ideas, the more I felt like I was seeing pieces of our present and glimpses of our future.

This books gave me the chills.

The plot is still more or less as I remembered it from grade nine: Guy Montag is a Fireman, and his job is to start fires. He burns books that have been banned, because their contents make people think, and that makes them unhappy. It isn’t until he meets Clarisse McClellan, a young girl considered crazy because she enjoys thinking and imagining, that Montag begins to question the world he lives in, but when he does, his world falls apart pretty quickly.

As the story moves forward, as I met all  the characters and really listened to what they were saying and thinking, I kept being surprised by the parts that were so much like our own world. Consider this passage from the book:

Montag’s wife has overdosed on sleeping pills, and Montag has called in help to rescue and revive her. Two machines are brought in by two operators: one to pump her stomach clean, the other to replace her pill-saturated blood with clean blood.

The operator stood smoking a cigarette…”Got to clean ‘em out both ways,” said the operator, standing over the silent woman. “No use getting the stomach if you don’t clean the blood. Leave that stuff in the blood and the blood hits the brain like a mallet, bang, a couple thousand times and the brain just gives up, just quits.”

“Stop it!” said Montag.

“I was just sayin’,” said the operator.

“Are you done?” said Montag.

…”We’re done.” His anger did not even touch them. They stood with the cigarette smoke curling around their noses and into their eyes without making them blink or squint.

“That’s fifty bucks.”

…”Neither of you is an M.D. Why didn’t they send an M.D. from Emergency?”

“Hell,…you don’t need an M.D., case like this, all you need is two handymen, clean up the problem in half an hour.”

It’s as if an overdose is no more problematic than a leaf-clogged gutter. Just clean it up, and bob’s yer uncle. No need for a doctor, or personalized attention at all. Just send in a couple of guys with a machine.

While I sincerely hope that our health care system will never get to this point, I can relate to the impersonal treatment that Montag’s wife receives. I know not all doctors are like that: bored, indifferent, and kind of rude – but too many of them are. I’ve had appointments with doctors who spent the entire appointment staring at a laptop and barely even glanced at me. I would have bet money that if you’d put me in a line-up five minutes later, they wouldn’t have been able to pick me out.

This passage about schooling in Montag’s world (as spoken by his boss, Beatty) caught my attention too:

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected…Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright’, and did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”

Sounds like our modern ideas about social promotion to me. And given that classes are getting larger and that teachers have very little authority over their students, I could see there being a proposal to shorten the school day, lighten the homework requirements, and forego discipline altogether – and I could see that proposal getting some serious consideration, too. I know, and have known, teachers – even English teachers – who have overlooked poor spelling and grammar because “the ideas were good”. They didn’t want to fail a student and deal with angry parents, hurt feelings, or the possibility of having what little authority they do have undermined by an unsupportive administration who passes the kid anyway. I could talk for pages and pages about the bullying epidemic going on in our schools today – and it’s not just the “bright boy” who is being bullied either, there’s a lot of kids who get tormented everyday by their so-called peers for a lot of different reasons, or no reason at all.

And Beatty says this to Montag in regard to 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?…Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book…Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information…And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

We still – still! – ban books because the subject matter is upsetting in some way; because the book might bring to light or trigger our less than savoury characteristics and beliefs:  racism, homophobia, cruelty, murder, greed, corruption, religious intolerance, cowardice, rudeness, selfishness, and any number of other flaws. We seem to prefer that the uncomfortable bits of books be taken out, or cleaned up and sanitized. We would rather speak incomprehensible, ‘politically correct’ gibberish to each other than speak plainly, because we don’t want to risk upsetting anyone. We’d rather ban a book (or burn it) than explain it or learn from it.

Montag and Beatty, their observations and explanations, the similarities of their world to mine…this book raises so many questions for me! It makes me wonder, is Ray Bradbury right – are there too many machines now? Are we in the process of building Montag’s world for ourselves? Is our technology helping us, or holding us back?  Are we getting further away from each other despite all the technology that is supposed to make it simpler to come together? Have we developed too many ways for us to escape real life and forget how to be truly human? Are there too many false things to lose ourselves in? Are we going through life with our eyes shut? Do we ever really see anything, or are we just taking a quick glance at things because that’s what everyone else is doing? Are we becoming more stupid, more insipid, more greedy and entitled and remorseless?

Some days, the pessimistic and melancholy days, I think we are up the creek as a species and I simply assume that this vision of ourselves will one day be a reality. Other days I feel hopeful that we’ll be OK, that’ll we’ll stop before it’s too late to take it back, and that we’ll avoid forcing ourselves to live in Montag’s world. But, most days, I wait to see what happens, and I try to keep from becoming part of the problems we have, I try to avoid the things, and behaviour, and stupidities that could lead us to Montag’s world.

I don’t always succeed in this, but I always try.

Next in the Tortured Breakfast Food series, I give you…burnt toast.

Butter *is* bad for burns, but what about apricot jam? Is that bad?

I actually like my toast a little burnt; it tastes crispier, and the butter and jam are less likely to make the bread soggy.