Guy Montag. The hero of Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, at one time a dystopia -- a world unfathomable for most -- is quickly becoming a reality in 2010. Whatever boundaries separated Montag’s world and ours are rapidly vanishing. As I sit down to write this entry, my mind staggers to coherently record my thoughts. It is as if I cannot understand how to feel because I am so unaccustomed to feeling. My day sees me to go from one screen to the next, whether it be my Mac or my Blackberry, my neck is in a perpetual state of perpendicular angles…constantly looking down and never up.
Just as Montag feels so peculiar and uncomfortable when Clarisse touches the dandelion to his face, as if to say that it is okay to lose yourself for a moment in the natural world, so do I feel as if I have been displaced into a perverted, narrative when I look up into the foreign sky. My body has become so accustomed to such unnatural states of being, that when I uncurl my fingers from the locked position they so often take while hovering over my computer, it hurts. My back creaks in agony when it is finally able to uncoil from the serpentine forms it takes while I devour my Subway sandwich at my desk.
We seem to have a created a world in which it is painful to return our bodies to their natural state. We have sacrificed the natural wonders of this great planet, and moreover, our own bodies for efficiency and heightened states of productivity in the work place.
Is our world so different from Montag’s world? I will let you uncoil your back from your computer and contemplate this for a moment.
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