François Truffaut
Fahrenheit 451

You come home smelling of kerosene, on the monorail the usual faces, those staring into space, those staring at the handrails, those fiddling with their new fur, and the kids giggling at nothing. You feel something you can't name. You're not as happy as the system wants you to be, your wife swallows those green pills as if they were sugar cubes: stimulants, probably making her enjoy the insipid and formal broadcasts of the cousins. The news of a probable promotion leaves you indifferent and leaves your wife indifferent as well, enchanted in front of the wall-size mega-screen; she tells you that now you could finally buy a second one. You don't feel like doing anything; you throw yourself onto the chair and stare at the illustrated newspaper without understanding what those cartoons are supposed to represent. You still wonder why, why do they have to read? What drives them still? Reading makes one unhappy, unsocial, and besides, it’s forbidden! Aren’t they happy? What are they missing? How many books have I burned today? How many more will I have to burn?

Then you meet a person who is different from the others on the monorail, you don’t notice, but she notices you, almost as if she sees that you too are different from the others. She starts to ask you questions, the same ones you were asking yourself, and she is sincerely and truly curious, interested. She is so similar to your wife but so terribly different, beautiful and blonde, with short hair and those blue eyes so probing. She leaves you with two questions that strike you irreparably: “Do you ever read the books you burn?”, “And are you happy?”. Your answers are mechanical, respectively, “Of course not” (you have better things to do and besides, it’s forbidden) and “Of course, yes” (really? after all, what is happiness, they tell us to be happy, but how are we supposed to be to be happy?).

You hide one of the books you should burn in the satchel, you don't even know why you do it, maybe to prove to yourself that reading is useless. It’s “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens. You wait for your wife to fall asleep, sneak into the kitchen, and start reading. Your reading is uncertain, some words you didn't even remember existed, but gradually as you go on, you start to find answers, you begin to give a name to what you feel: frustration, sadness, incompleteness. You start to rediscover memories and experiences, you begin to feel interested in remembering things. You want more, you feel behind.

Meanwhile, you start to see, everything around is so fake, the cars and the fire truck look like toys, the women look like Barbies, the houses like colored cardboard boxes in absurd shades, everything is cold and empty. You've never really lived. You try to make your wife and her friends understand, but they pretend not to hear, not to be touched by what you read to them with feeling. You can no longer do the job you did before, you can no longer "live" as you did before, you just want to reclaim what was denied to you from birth: Knowledge, Culture, and all that they entail.