I once met Ray Bradbury, and he told me of writing his early stories on coin-in-the-slot typewriters in the basement of the UCLA library. Pounding the keyboard against the clock, the author of Fahrenheit 451 must have developed a keen sense of the human care and effort represented by a page of text, and thus the pathos of its destruction. I recalled this as I watched Michael Moore's carefully understated treatment, in Fahrenheit 911, of the violent annihilation of the World Trade Center towers. Moore played the sounds of the fatal moments over a black screen, then simply cut to a blizzard of paper floating down on to the streets of Manhattan - thousands upon thousands of sheets suddenly ripped from the desks and files where they had been so carefully cradled, and hurled high into the morning air. You think immediately of the hands that held them.
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