Doubletalk
By Shanoyu
Dear Mr. Beatty,
Although my identity may be a mystery to you, I assure you it is of no relevance, as any action you take as a result of
this letter will be posthumous to myself. Further confusion may arise from the possible motivations behind the drafting and composition of a
letter such as this. I assure you, my motivations are purely that of an uninvolved observer who wishes to call the game before it's over,
climbing out on the slippery limb of motivations, perspectives, and predictions. that is all this letter can be, after all; since I am
writing this letter to you based on events forseen; we are entering the murky waters of time travel. You could not possibly change your
projected course of actions, because that would change the content of this letter, and then you could not possibly have read this incarnation of
the letter to change your actions, as the letter's content could have been determined before you were even born. Thus if you recieve the letter,
and change your actions due to the content of this letter, then this letter has already affected your actions, although I have no indications that
this is the situation.
Simply, my point is that you lie about your motivations. You claim to be a preserver of peace, a soldier of
happiness, but this is a lie. Your goal as a fireman is simply the preservation of books. You do no more than hint at it
because your deepest fear is that the people responsible for this error, your employers, will realise their folly and act
to correct the situation.
It may not be obvious to those around you, Beatty, but it's happened before, it's happening now, and it will
surely happen again: the fireman's accidental exploitation of hardwired human emotion in favor of your clandestine mission. This is known
only to those who can read the codewords you guardedly let loose past your lips, those very learned lips, spouting off a few lines of poetry, a few
riddles of verse. You're such a hypocrite according simply to what you say, but you don't mean any of that happiness garbage you spout. In
fact, you let little of your own mind past your lips. What a symmetrical world you must have created in your own mind. Bizzaro Beatty!
Up means down, left means right, smile means frown, and darkness means light! Stand on this chair! Have a glass of
sand! Hah! You burn books not to preserve the peace and happiness of the world, but to preserve the books themselves, exploiting the hardwired
property concept people are born with. The people don't want books? Take them away. People only preserve that which is in immediate danger; no one
ever guards against the continuious march of time. So, promote them by destroying them. If there's a threat, there's a protector, if there's a
protector, it's protected. You honestly think Montag would have educated himself to the degree he has if it wasn't for the
censorship? Perhaps, but not likely.
Education has always been reserved for those who seek it. Thanks to you, many more will travel
down the paths of wisdom, and more will keep the paths maintained. but remember, Beatty, by the time this secretive quest of Machiavellian
plotting and betrayal is over, the only person you'll have to look at in the mirror, the
only person you'll have to live with, the only person who can atone for and avenge for your sins is yourself.
Lecture over, Beatty;
don't forget to wash the kerosene out of your hair before lighting your pipe.
This letter was actually an english assignment for the book Fahrenheit 451. The assignment I selected was to write Beatty a letter,
about what? Well I think it's pretty clear. I got a 95/100 on this assignment, by the way. Ignore the fact that Doubletalk isn't
a word. She didn't mark off for it. =)
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