You, my mythological readers, are perhaps wondering where the title of this blog comes from. It does not, alas, come from my brain, because my brain is not nearly so lovely. (It is squishy, and thieving. Or at the very least, squirrel-like.) Rather, it comes from the brain of Ray Bradbury.
To be perfectly honest, I never expected to like Fahrenheit 451. I somehow managed to escape it being force-fed to me in high school, and it never came up in college until I decided it was high time I actually read it. With some prompting from a vlogbrothers video. I mean, I love dystopian sci-fi, but I always expected it was going to be a little too sci-fi, where all the literary merit is in the metaphor of the plot.
What I didn't expect was for the writing to be absolutely beautiful. Lyrical, rich, and beautiful, but in a tasteful, appropriate way for the subject matter. As one of my former Creative Writing professors might say, Ray Bradbury knows how to write a sentence.
This is the passage my blog title found itself from:
The shape exploded away. The eyes vanished. The leafpiles flew up in a dry shower.
Montag was alone in the wilderness.
A deer. He smelled the heavy musk-like perfume mingled with blood and the gummed exhalation of the animal's breath, all cardamom and moss and ragweed odour in this huge night where the trees ran at him, ran, pulled away, to the pulse of the heart behind his eyes (137).
To be perfectly honest, I don't remember a lot about what's happening in this scene, since I read the book last year. All I know is that something about those words was so beautiful to me that I haven't been able to delete the book off of my Nook, even though I know I probably won't read it again, or at least for a long while yet. Perhaps it's silly, but something about that trio of words collided with me on a personal level that I don't think I often experience as a reader. Something about the combination of food and nature imagery, I suppose.
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