Fahrenheit 451

by Ray Bradbury

They walked still further and the girl said, “Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?” “No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it.”

“Why? You got a guilty conscience about something?” Montag glanced up swiftly.

Had he ever seen a fireman that didn’t have black hair, black brows, a fiery face, and a blue-steel shaved but unshaved look? These men were all mirror images of himself! Were all firemen picked then for their looks as well as their proclivities?

Established, 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies. First Fireman: Benjamin Franklin.

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy,

Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”

It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were

The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth? But when he was held, rootless, in midair, by Hercules, he perished easily.

“And the second?” “Leisure.”

But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’ ”

But with all my knowledge and skepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full color, three dimensions, and being in and part of those incredible parlors.

Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it’s a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels anymore.

the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters.

“Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.” “So that’s what I am.” “There’s some of it in all of us.”

“Go to the firehouse when it’s time. I’ll be with you. Let’s listen to this Captain Beatty together. He could be one of us. God knows. I’ll give you things to say. We’ll give him a good show. Do

“I don’t want to change sides and just be told what to do. There’s no reason to change if I do that.” “You’re wise already!”

“Here.” Far away across town in the night, the faintest whisper of a turned page. “The Book of Job.”

“How’re your children, Mrs. Phelps?” he asked. “You know I haven’t any! No one in his right mind, the Good Lord knows, would

have children!” said Mrs. Phelps, not quite sure why she was angry with this man.

“I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. I put up with them when they come home three days a month;

“What possessed the ‘Outs’ to run him? You just don’t go running a little short man like that against a tall man. Besides—he mumbled. Half the time I couldn’t hear a word he said. And the words I did hear I didn’t understand!”

But Montag was gone and back in a moment with a book in his hand. “Guy!” “Damn it all, damn it all, damn it!”

“Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can’t believe it!”

“the crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We’re all sheep who have strayed at times.

Stick with the firemen, Montag. All else is dreary chaos!”

Beatty was watching his face. “Something the matter, Montag?” “Why,” said Montag slowly, “we’ve stopped in front of my house.”

What is fire? It’s a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.

If there was no solution, well then now there was no problem, either. Fire was best for everything.

Montag saw the surprise there and himself glanced to his hands to see what new thing they had done. Thinking back later he could never decide whether the hands or Beatty’s reaction to the hands gave him the final push toward murder.

He stood and he had only one leg. The other was like a chunk of burnt pine log he was carrying along as a penance for some obscure sin.

Beatty wanted to die. In the middle of the crying Montag knew it for the truth. Beatty had wanted to die. He had just stood there, not really trying to save himself, just stood there, joking, needling, thought Montag, and the thought was enough to stifle his sobbing and let him pause for air. How strange, strange, to want to

The beetle was rushing. The beetle was roaring. The beetle raised its speed. The beetle was whining. The beetle was in high thunder. The beetle came skimming. The beetle came in a single whistling trajectory, fired from an invisible rifle.

Mrs. Black, are you asleep in there? he thought. This isn’t good, but your husband did it to others and never asked and never wondered and never worried. And now since you’re a fireman’s wife, it’s your house and your turn, for all the houses your husband burned and the people he hurt without thinking. The house did not reply. He hid the books in the kitchen

he phoned the alarm at a lonely phone booth outside a store

How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can’t breathe. There’s Beatty dead, and he was my friend once, and there’s Millie gone, I thought she was my wife, but now I don’t know. And the house all burnt. And my job gone and myself on the run, and I planted a book in a fireman’s house on the way.

“You did what you had to do. It was coming on for a long time.” “Yes, I believe that, if there’s nothing else I believe. It saved itself up to happen. I could feel it for a long time, I was saving something up, I went around doing one thing and feeling another. God, it was all there. It’s a wonder it didn’t show on me, like fat.

limned

What could he say in a single word, a few words, that would sear all their faces and wake them up?

With an effort, Montag reminded himself again that this was no fictional episode to be watched on his run to the river; it was in actuality his own chess game he was witnessing, move by move.

Of course! Why hadn’t they done it before! Why, in all the years, hadn’t this game been tried! Everyone up, everyone out! He couldn’t be missed! The only man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!

He ran out away from the last row of houses, on a slope leading down to a solid moving blackness.

He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.

He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it

The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burned things with the firemen and the sun burned Time, that meant that everything burned! One of them had to stop burning.