If a picture paints a thousand words—wait, that sounds too much like a Bread song. Everyone knows by now that a picture is worth a thousand words, but do people ever wonder about the power of the word? Letters are little more than loops and lines, and words are little more than combinations of letters, yet we can express the most profound thoughts and ideas using these symbols, and others know exactly what we mean.

As a bit of a bookworm, the importance of the word has never been lost on me. My reading began before I could even read when my parents read to me at home, and later at school before the classrooms were air conditioned, and the best way to stay cool was to sit still and listen to the teacher read. Something clicked in those early days and I’ve been reading since.

Imagine my chagrin, then, when I learned that some people want to ban certain books. I’ve since come to learn that essentially every good book has been challenged at some point or rather. Of late, there are of course Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code. Both are among the best-sellers of all-time, yet small sects of society wish to deny everyone the basic right of reading them for enjoyment.

A bookless society is not an original idea. Ray Bradbury banged out Fahrenheit 451 over nine days in a library basement in the early 1950s. That book tells of a society where firemen are called not to put out fires, but to burn books. Instead of reading, residents sit in living rooms with wall-sized television screens and participate in the shows. The result? A brain-dead, conformist society that does as it’s told without asking questions. Not everyone can afford screens that large in 2007, but with so much “reality” programming and advertisements everywhere, Bradbury didn’t miss by much.

In Bradbury’s book, a curious neighbor dies, and the main character is told that asking questions leads to unhappiness, and that the girl is better off dead. Enter Aldous Huxley’s 1932 book Brave New World. The characters in that book have everything they need to be happy. Or do they? As infants, they are placed in a room with books and flowers, then shocked and scared as to be conditioned to fear both as adults. They are brainwashed in their sleep. Desire does not exist because they can have whomever they want whenever they want. And finally, should this not be enough, they have a miracle drug to ease the mind. Not one of Huxley’s characters ever swallowed a Prozac, but they sure gobbled up that soma!

While both of those books hit on the importance of art and literature for a deeper happiness, George Orwell’s 1984 takes it a step further. In that story, the language of the society is being rewritten by the Big Brother government to eliminate emotional expression. No longer can something be great, or super, or fantastic! Instead, it can be good, or doubleplusgood. Not quite the same, and the point is clear: words are more than simple communication. They are expression!

Finally, Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron tells of an egalitarian society where everyone is handicapped to the “lowest common denominator.” The intellectuals are subject to loud tones in a headset to prevent deep thought. Beautiful people are forced to cover themselves. The strong must carry extra weight to slow them down. While the story is profound enough, the low-budget movie of the same title has an even better dilemma: music is banned because it invokes passion, and impassioned people do crazy things. He who cannot play the piano may kill he who can in a fit of jealous rage!

All of these brilliant ideas expressed with a mere collection of black shapes on white paper. Ironically, it is often these types of books first on the ban lists, making them all the more clairvoyant. While I’ve never been so outraged by a word, and felt so self-righteous in my anger to want to deny it to everyone else, I am forced to wonder if that conditioning experiment in Brave New World was really fiction at all.

-Mike Courson