Distracted Happiness “Ignorance is a virtue” This saying is known far and wide by people of all ages, and all over, yet we rarely stop to wonder the meaning in it. Is is saying that we should strive for ignorance, that we shouldn’t try to know all that we can, or is it simply stating that we don’t always need to know everything? For the society in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, ignorance and distraction is a way of life. They are constantly distracted by their “family” and never look out the window to see the miserable state their country is in. The people of Montag’s society don’t know what true happiness is because they believe that they are happy in their distracted lives with “families”, and fail to differentiate real world problems and …show more content…
Mildred is ignorant to the fullest extent, yet she believes that her life is perfectly swell and happy, just her and her parlor: “‘My ‘family’ is my people. They tell me things; I laugh, they laugh! And the colors!’”(69). Mildred has never ventured into the deeper thoughts of books. Subsequently, she only knows the superficial happiness of laughing with her parlor walls, and seeing the brilliant colors of this fake reality. She doesn’t know the happiness of true depth of knowledge of the world. Mildred doesn’t see her unhappiness because she hasn’t known any other, deeper, kind of happiness. She doesn’t seem to see the difference between reality and fictitious stories. Maybe it’s because she wishes to have the seemingly perfect lives of those TV stars she sees, or maybe she can’t differentiate simply because she is so used to the fake reality that she spends all of her life in. Yet unlike Mildred, Montag discovers that there is more to happiness than just thinking you have it after meeting Clarisse. Montag finds that “He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl ran off across the lawn with the mask”(9). Montag discovers that even though he thought he was happy, he really wasn’t. He might of believed that his happiness was true, but this belief was shattered when he realized that the world that he lived in was deeper than