Fahrenheit 451

I recently posed this question to a group of RUFers:

At the end of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury tells us that each one of the rebels/book-lovers living along the train tracks had become a book--that is, had memorised an entire book, so that they could pass that knowledge on to the generations to come.

If you were stuck in that story, what book would you memorise?

The replies included:
Screwtape Letters by Lewis,
the Space Trilogy by Lewis,
The Great Divorce by Lewis,
The Fall by Albert Camus,
The Man Who Was Thursday by Chesterton,
the collected verse of Gerard Manly Hopkins,
the collected stories of Flannery O'Connor,
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene Peterson,
The Book of Common Prayer, and
Tom Brown's Wilderness Survival Guide.

The person who picked the last also said, 'I mean, if there aren't any books, things are gonna get pretty dicey, no?'

Isn't it interesting how we all seem stuck in the mid-1900s? Why? Do Christians think that those are the only good authors? If so, what ever happened to Beowulf, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Calvin, Luther, Edwards, Rossetti, Stevenson, Carroll, &tc.? Not to mention all of the authors I've forgotten or don't know yet. It would be a terrible thing to lose those authors and those stories. But I'm afraid that even Presbyterians, who claim higher intelligence than those in other denominations, I say even Presbyterians are turning to modern books for their knowledge and losing touch with our history.

That makes me sad. It makes me sad everytime someone laughs at me because they think I have too many books. Those poor people don't know what they're missing. They are why I will always give books as presents.