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“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.”
“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”
There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
She didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead.”
Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.
“We begin by beginning, I guess.”
“Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it’s too late.”
We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing.
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 public itself stopped reading of its own accord.
So few want to be rebels anymore.
Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you’re a squirrel?”
You see? How like a beautiful statue of ice it was, melting in the sun. I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And then 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.”
“I don’t want to change sides and just be told what to do. There’s no reason to change if I do that.”
The Army said so. Quick war. Forty-eight hours they said, and everyone home.
You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by.
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.
You always said, don’t face a problem, burn it. Well, now I’ve done both. Goodbye, Captain.
Beatty wanted to die. In the middle of the crying Montag knew it for the truth. Beatty had wanted to die.
You must remember, burn them or they’ll burn you, he thought. Right now it’s as simple as that.
“It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know I’m drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can’t breathe.
I’ve heard there are still hobo camps all across the country, here and there; walking camps they call them, and if you keep walking far enough and keep an eye peeled, they say there’s lots of old Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los Angeles. Most of them are wanted and
hunted in the cities. They survive, I guess. There aren’t many of
It was not burning, it was warming.
It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.
And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. Yes, thought Montag, that’s the one I’ll
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon,
nly a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin achieved.
Usheresque mansion, uses these horrors to destroy the governing elite responsible for the burning of all art and literature.
“They began by controlling books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures, there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of thefuture, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”
The pedestrian became young Clarisse McClellan, a reader of forbidden books, a questioner of authority, and a solitary late-night walker.
During the summer of 1950, Bradbury composed the first draft of “The Fireman,”
This opening scene disappears from all subsequent versions of Fahrenheit 451.
Joycean
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon
Bradbury signed a contract with Ballantine in mid-January 1953, but by this time the novella collection had taken on a very different focus.
“The Fireman” into Fahrenheit 451 extended through two of the most disturbing announcements the world had known since the dark days of World War II. In late October 1952, the United States proclaimed the successful test of a hydrogen bomb, a weapon far more destructive than the atomic bombs that had ended the war in the Pacific.
In his final form, Leahy (renamed Beatty) brings out a far richer description of the way the world became a mindless consumerist society incapable of saving itself from looming nuclear annihilation.
Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” laid in our recent past, and George Orwell’s “1984,” set in our immediate future. And here we are, poised between the two, between a dreadful reality and an unformed terror, trying to make such decisions as will avoid the tyranny of the very far right and the tyranny of the very far left, the two of which can often be seen coalescing into a tyranny pure and simple, with no qualifying adjective in front of it at all.8
So here we have, then, Montag running through the future, pursued by book burners, trying to save knowledge. And all this goes back
into my own background when I was a child.
So my love of books is so intense that I finally have done—what? I have written a book about a man falling in love with books.
The essay eventually became the afterword to the 1996 Ballantine trade paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451, confirming Bradbury’s abiding enthusiasm for the stage and film versions that emerged from the original novel.
rented out at a dime a half hour.
Guy Montag, home to his apartment. Entering, Montag is stunned to discover the thousands upon thousands of books lining the walls of the Fire Chief’s hidden library! Montag turns and cries out to his superior: “But you’re the Chief Burner! You can’t have books on your premises!”
“It’s not owning books that’s a crime, Montag, it’s reading them! Yes, that’s right. I own books, but don’t read them!”
“Why, life happened to me.”
