F451 Assignment #10

"I remember. Montag clung to the earth. I remember. Chicago. Chicago, a long time ago. Millie and I. That's where we met! I remember now. Chicago. A long time ago" (Bradbury 160). Montag was finally realizing the importance of remembering things. Because of the belief of all books being bad which led to no means of keeping records, those who had already had this revelation trained themselves to be capable of memorizing and being able to recite large amounts of information. When it came to the hobos he met on his journey, some of them had even memorized entire books. Not one, but multiple. Montag would have to train himself at this skill and it started by simply piecing his life back together in his brain, starting with the return of the memory of where he and Millie had first met. Not only were these hobos more intelligent than almost all of the people Montag had encountered throughout his entire life when it came to memorizing, they were also a lot more aware of other important aspects of their lives: "There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up...But everytime he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing over and over, but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had...We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddam funeral pures and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation" (Bradbury 163). These hobos knew what we being done by burning books and the damage that it had already caused and that it would cause in the future if it were to continue. They were so aware of this because they also knew how great books truly were and how important they were to the growth of mankind. The fact that they were familiar with these ideas and were planning on taking action in order to be sure their knowledge continued to spread until books were to come back onto the scene proved that although not many believed in the kind of knowledge that they had anymore, it really was the knowledge that would be everlasting.