Fahrenheit 451

by Ray Bradbury

Her dress was white and it whispered.

He felt she was walking in a circle about him, turning him end for end, shaking him quietly, and emptying his pockets, without once moving herself.

“It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”

“I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,” she said. “If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur? That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows.

“I rarely watch the ‘parlor walls’ or go to races or Fun Parks. So I’ve lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess.

“And if you look”—she nodded at the sky—“there’s a man in the moon.” He hadn’t looked for a long time.

They walked the rest of the way in silence, hers thoughtful, his a kind of clenching and uncomfortable silence in which he shot her accusing glances.

He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

The breath coming out the nostrils was so faint it stirred only the furthest fringes of life, a small leaf, a black feather, a single fiber of hair.

If we had a fourth wall, why it’d be just like this room wasn’t ours at all, but all kinds of exotic people’s rooms.

“Does it have a happy ending?” “I haven’t read that far.”

“I’ve got to be going, so say you forgive me, I don’t want you angry with me.” “I’m not angry. Upset, yes.”

“They want to know what I do with all my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think.

“You have forgiven me, haven’t you?” “Yes.” He thought about it. “Yes, I have. God knows why. You’re peculiar, you’re aggravating, yet you’re easy to forgive. You say you’re seventeen?” “Well—next month.” “How odd. How strange. And my wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at times. I can’t get over it.” “You’re peculiar yourself, Mr. Montag. Sometimes I even forget you’re a fireman. Now, may I make you angry again?” “Go ahead.”

You’re not like the others. I’ve seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You’re one of the few who put up with me. That’s why I think it’s so strange you’re a fireman, it just doesn’t seem right for you, somehow.”

And she ran off and left him standing there in the rain. Only after a long time did he move. And then, very slowly, as he walked, he tilted his head back in the rain, for just a few moments, and opened his mouth. . . .

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse.

It was like a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself.

It doesn’t like or dislike. It just ‘functions.’ It’s like a lesson in ballistics. It has a trajectory we decide on for it. It follows through. It targets itself, homes itself, and cuts off. It’s only copper wire, storage batteries, and electricity.”

“Its calculators can be set to any combination, so many amino acids, so much sulphur, so much butterfat and alkaline. Right?” “We know all that.” “All of those chemical balances and percentages on all of us here in the house are recorded in the master file downstairs. It would be easy for someone to set up a partial combination on the Hound’s ‘memory,’ a touch of amino acids, perhaps. That would account for what the animal did just now. Reacted toward me.”

But Montag did not move and only stood thinking of the ventilator grill in the hall at home and what lay hidden behind the grill. If someone here in the firehouse knew about the ventilator then mightn’t they “tell” the Hound . . . ?

“It doesn’t think anything we don’t want it to think.” “That’s sad,” said Montag, quietly, “because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that’s all it can ever know.”

“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?” “Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you. And because we know each other.”

“Let’s talk about something else. Have you ever smelled old leaves?

“I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it?

Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you?

I guess I’m everything they say I am, all right. I haven’t any friends. That’s supposed to prove I’m abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?” “You sound so very old.”

“People don’t talk about anything.” “Oh, they must!” “No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.

Montag looked at the cards in his own hands. “I—I’ve been thinking. About the fire last week. About the man whose library we fixed. What happened to him?” “They took him screaming off to the asylum.” “He wasn’t insane.” Beatty arranged his cards quietly. “Any man’s insane who thinks he can fool the government and us.”

RULE 1. Answer the alarm quickly. 2. Start the fire swiftly. 3. Burn everything. 4. Report back to firehouse immediately. 5. Stand alert for other Alarms.

Montag sat in his chair. Below, the orange dragon coughed to life.

‘Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ ” “Enough of that!” said Beatty. “Where are they?” He slapped her face with amazing objectivity and repeated the question. The old woman’s eyes came to a focus upon Beatty. “You know where they are or you wouldn’t be here,” she said.

Montag’s hand closed like a mouth, crushed the book with wild devotion, with an insanity of mindlessness to his chest. The men above were hurling shovelfuls of magazines into the dusty air. They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood below, like a small girl, among the bodies.

The books lay like great mounds of fishes left to dry.

“You can’t ever have my books,” she said. “You know the law,” said Beatty. “Where’s your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!”

Wasn’t there an old joke about the wife who talked so much on the telephone that her desperate husband ran out to the nearest store and telephoned her to ask what was for dinner?

And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty.

“Will you turn the parlor off?” he asked. “That’s my family.” “Will you turn it off for a sick man?” “I’ll turn it down.” She went out of the room and did nothing to the parlor and came back. “Is that better?” “Thanks.” “That’s my favorite program,” she said.

“Did something happen?” “A fire, is all.” “I had a nice evening,” she said, in the bathroom. “What doing?” “The parlor.” “What was on?” “Programs.” “What programs?” “Some of the best ever.” “Who?” “Oh, you know, the bunch.” “Yes, the bunch, the bunch, the bunch.” He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odor of kerosene made him vomit. Mildred came in, humming. She was surprised. “Why’d you do that?” He looked with dismay at the floor. “We burned an old woman with her books.” “It’s a good thing the rug’s washable.” She fetched a mop and worked on it.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about last night?” he said. “What about it?” “We burned a thousand books. We burned a woman.” “Well?” The parlor was exploding with sound. “We burned copies of Dante and Swift and Marcus Aurelius.” “Wasn’t he a European?” “Something like that.”

“Mildred, how would it be if, well, maybe I quit my job awhile?” “You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one night, some woman and her books—” “You should have seen her, Millie!” “She’s nothing to me; she shouldn’t have had books. It was her responsibility, she should’ve thought of that. I hate her. She’s got you going and next thing you know we’ll be out, no house, no job, nothing.” “You weren’t there, you didn’t see,” he said. “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.” “She was simple-minded.” “She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burned her.” “That’s water under the bridge.” “No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smolders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me the rest of my life. God! I’ve been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I’m crazy with trying.”

“It’s not just the woman that died,” said Montag. “Last night I thought about all that kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before.” He got out of bed. “It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it’s all over.”

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

Mildred said, “Well, now you’ve done it. Out front of the house. Look who’s here.” “I don’t care.” “There’s a Phoenix car just drove up and a man in a black shirt with an orange snake stitched on his arm coming up the front walk.” “Captain Beatty?” he said. “Captain Beatty.” Montag did not move, but stood looking into the cold whiteness of the wall immediately before him.

Montag made sure the book was well hidden behind the pillow, climbed slowly back into bed, arranged the covers over his knees and across his chest, half-sitting, and after a while Mildred moved and went out of the room and Captain Beatty strolled in, his hands in his pockets. “Shut the ‘relatives’ up,” said Beatty, looking around at everything except Montag and his wife. This time, Mildred ran. The yammering voices stopped yelling in the parlor. Captain Beatty sat down in the most comfortable chair with a peaceful look on his ruddy face. He took time to prepare and light his brass pipe and puff out a great smoke cloud. “Just thought I’d come by and see how the sick man is.”

Beatty puffed his pipe. “Every fireman, sooner or later, hits this. They only need understanding, to know how the wheels run. Need to know the history of our profession. They don’t feed it to rookies like they used to. Damn shame.” Puff.

“Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?”

Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors.

Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”