Ray Bradbury

Ich wollte heute nichts schreiben, ich wollte mich darin üben, mal einen Tag nichts zu schreiben. Habe ich vor Tagen schon mal gemacht. An dem Tag, als hier nichts Neues stand, hatte ich 1.144 Leser. Aber jetzt muss hier doch etwas stehen. Ich las gerade in der Zeitung, dass der Schriftsteller Ray Bradbury im Alter von 91 Jahren gestorben ist. Da bin ich froh, dass ich ihm vor zwei Jahren zum neunzigsten Geburtstag gratuliert habe. Lesen Sie ➱das doch heute noch mal, ist auch immer noch gut. Der Mann, der Fahrenheit 451 geschrieben hat, hat auch einmal gesagt: There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. Und Bücher hat er gelesen. Er war nie auf einer Universität: Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years. Die öffentlichen Bibliotheken waren für ihn better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money.

In einer Szene von Fahrenheit 451 hat er den Verfall der Kultur, dieses dumbing down, das uns umgibt, sehr schön beschrieben: Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending...Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of 'Hamlet' ... was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: ‘now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours.’ Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more. Speed up the film... quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!... School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts? The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.... Life becomes one big pratfall... everything bang, boff, and wow!