Dover Beach

When Ray Bradbury wrote, in 1951, about televisions that covered an entire wall of a room in his novel Fahrenheit 451 do you think he thought that this would happen? And that the output from those televisions would be so consuming and pointless? When his character Montag questioned the misnomer 'living room' do you think he thought that what he wrote was more prophetic than science fiction?

Walking home from work recently I was being nosey and peeking in people's houses. It struck me that practically every house had an oversized television in the corner blaring out meaningless quiz shows and soap operas, that the viewers had more time in their lives to watch the events of fictional characters in a fictional landscape than to do something worthwhile with their own time. I am as guilty as most in this. I go home after a day of trying to convince strangers that they should buy my product rather than my neighbours and watch television - and not usually something that I choose to watch but just something - anything. I rarely learn anything from it and it never provokes an emotional reaction. I can't remember that last time that I questioned anything or had my thoughts provoked from watching television.

Is this a good use of my time? I don't think so. It concerns me more when I equate time with life and I ask the question - Is this a good use of my life? If I learned anything from my mother's death it was that you can't expect to live a long life - it just might not happen and so I should try to make more of my time / life.

In Bradbury's novel Montag provokes an emotional reaction from one of his wife's friends by reading the last two stanzas of a poem called Dover Beach which was written by Matthew Arnold. The poem was written soon after the author honey mooned on the south coast of England and begins with an air of optimism mixed with melancholy. This feeling diminishes as the poem progresses and he reflects on, amongst other things, the retreat of faith in the modern world (this was written in 1867 by the way.) I particularly like the final stanza which seems to be a call to his new wife to stand strong together in a bleak and dark world.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.