Blurring Lines

Since I first mastered the magic of stringing letters into words, words into sentences, and sentences into stories, I have been a voracious—and omnivorous—reader. Most recently this has manifested itself with non-fiction: fascinating insights into the natural world like Sy Montgomery’s Soul of an Octopus and Helen Scales’ Spirals in Time: The Secret and Curious Afterlife of Seashells, or the plethora of productivity and self-help books I listed on Tuesday (far cheaper than a career coach or therapist!).

Yet fiction was my first love. In elementary school there was Beverly Clearly’s Ramona books, Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik, and John D. Fitzgerald’s the Great Brain of course, but I also journeyed with the Murry siblings through A Wrinkle in Time and beyond, toured Middle Earth with Bilbo and Frodo, and tackled that ode to the antebellum South, Gone with the Wind. Then from approximately the ages of 13-15, I entered my Stephen King phase.

My gateway into this often dark, rather macabre, yet all-encompassing world was the novella Langoliers from Four Past Midnight. Yet I was not—and still am not—a fan of horror films. Blood and gore simply for the sake of it does not appeal. But a cracking story with interesting characters and a well-developed plot? Bring it on. Yes, reading about the vampires of ‘Salem’s Lot may have encouraged me to sleep with the light on once or twice, but I found the works of King thrilling, with an edge of delicious scariness. It was because they were not real that I found them so engaging: it was escapism with a shot of adrenaline.

At the same time that I was immersing myself in King’s back catalogue, there were two books I read that scared me in a very different way, and which I have not been able to bring myself to read since. One was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the opening line of which—It was a pleasure to burn—is seared into my memory. The burning in question? Books. As a budding book collector and bibliophile, the thought filled me with dread. But the underlying philosophy, that of the destruction of knowledge, of creativity, of “dangerous” ideas as a way of controlling the population? The limited attention spans and the thoughtless consumption of mass media that forms the background to Montag’s world? All were far more frightening than anything Stephen King could throw at me.

The second was a book that has been in the news a lot this past month, from topping the charts at Amazon to transferring to Broadway: 1984.

In Orwell’s dystopia, the Government is driven by a cult of personality, hatred, and a belief in slogans: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. Facts are manipulated and history revised. Language is perverted to justify endless war, limitations on personal freedom, and undermine the very cohesion of society. I can still remember how I felt when I finished the book: shocked and uneasy in a way that I hadn’t felt before—or since—when reading a work of fiction.

Although these books hit a nerve with my teenage-self, they also impressed upon me something that I have not forgotten: words have power. What we say, how we say it, whether we speak up at all for our principles or stay silent—it matters. As the lines between fiction and reality have started to uncomfortably blur, at the very least this lesson remains.