Around 1.00 in the morning today Kim enters the kitchen, pretty tired and exhausted. I start reading aloud:
–“The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough so he could follow the tune. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning.”
–What’s so remarkable about the passage?
–I am just going over Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” again — for my work with students. The text was written in 1953.
–And? Earphones did exist in 1953.
–Studio variant, I guess, mostly. To be worn during one hour of recording or something. Not to walk or sleep with.
–Well, yes.
–Small earphones “seashell type” and complete self-oblivion while sticking them in is the tide of the early 1990s. Again and again I keep wondering with what powers he did see how our everyday life would look like in the 2000s-2010s?
I don’t think he shares my amazement, but every time I return to the book, I understand that its antiutopianism is not far from being true.
Especially fight with dissenting ideas. And “parlour walls” — large televisions lining the walls of the living room — idiot boxes, perfect weapon in information wars.
You say “well it was only evident that the events would arrive at it”. Yes. Post-factum everything is clear. Always.
Try describing 2100. Show how “evident” it is.
11 February 2017. — Moscow (Russia)