I know these are long and I could�ve edited out some of the narrative, but I
didn�t on purpose, because I want you to wonder about it and go read the
book. If this is all you ever read of Fahrenheit 451, then this is no better than
a digest-digest digest and Montag�s world is upon us. A snake is a snake,
even if it�s pink and spotted. Or on the internet.
BEATTY
"When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about,
where, when? Well, I�d say it really got started around about a thing called
the Civil War. Even though our rule book claims it was founded earlier. The
fact is we didn�t get along well until photography came into its own.
Then-motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio, Television.
Things began to have mass."
Montag sat in bed, not moving.
"And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty.
"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 pastepudding norm,
do you follow me?"
"I think so."
Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture
it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then,
in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter.
Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the
snap ending."
"Snap ending," Mildred nodded.
"Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a
two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line
dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for
reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know
the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you,
Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of 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. Do you see? Out of the nursery and into the college
and back to the nursery; there�s your intellectual pattern for the past five
centuries or more."
Mildred rose and began to move around the room, picking things up
and putting them down. Beatty ignored her and continued:
"Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick,
Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where,
Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong Boom! Digest-digests,
digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!
Then, in midair, all vanishes! Whirl man�s mind around about so fast under
the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge
flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!"
Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and
jump again as she patted his pillow. Right now she was pulling at his
shoulder to try to get him to move so she could take the pillow out and fix it
nicely and put it back. And perhaps cry out and stare or simply reach down
her hand and say, "What�s this?" and hold up the hidden book with touching
innocence.
"School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories,
languages dropped, English and spelling gradually 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?"
"Let me fix your pillow," said Mildred.
"No!" whispered Montag.
"The zipper diplaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to
think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy
hour."
Mildred said, "Here."
"Get away," said Montag.
"Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang, boff, and
wow!"
"Wow," said Mildred, yanking at the pillow.
"For God�s sake, let me be!" cried Montag passionately.
Beatty opened his eyes wide.
Mildred�s hand had frozen behind the pillow. Her fingers were tracing
the book�s outline and as the shape became familiar her face looked surprised
and then stunned. Her mouth opened to ask a question...
"Empty the theaters save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass
walls and pretty colors running up and down the walls like confetti or blood
or sherry or sauterne. You like baseball, don�t you, Montag?"
"Baseball�s a fine game."
Now Beatty was almost invisible, a voice somewhere behind a screen
of smoke.
"What�s this?" asked Mildred, almost with delight. Montag heaved
back against her arms. "What�s this here?"
"Sit down!" Montag shouted. She jumped away, her hands empty.
"We�re talking!"
Beatty went on as if nothing had happened. "You like bowling, don�t
you, Montag?"
"Bowling, yes."
"And golf?"
"Golf is a fine game."
"Basketball?"
"A fine game."
"Billiards, pool? Football?"
"Fine games, all of them."
"More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don�t have to
think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports.
More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less.
Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere,
somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Town turn into motels, people
in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living
tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before."
Mildred went out of the room and slammed the door. The parlor
"aunts" began to laugh at the parlor "uncles."
"Now, let�s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger
the population, the more minorities. Don�t step on the toes of the dog lovers,
the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists,
Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans,
Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this
book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters,
cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the
less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities
with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your
typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca.
Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder
books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it
wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the
three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It
didn�t come from the government down. There was no dictum, no
declaration, no censorship to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation,
and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them,
you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old
confessions, or trade journals."
"Yes, but what about the firemen, then?" asked Montag.
"Ah," Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe.
"What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more
runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers
instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word
�intellectual�, of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You
always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own
school class who was exceptionally �bright�, did most of the reciting and
answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And
wasn�t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours?
Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as
the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of
every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them
cower to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house
next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breech man�s mind.
who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won�t
stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed
completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other
night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were
given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our
understandable and right dread of being inferior: official censor, judges,
executioners. That�s you, Montag, and that�s me."
The door to the parlor opened and Mildred stood there looking in at
them, looking at Beatty and then at Montag. Behind her the walls of the room
were flooded with green and yellow and orange fireworks sizzling and
bursting to some music composed almost completely of trap drums,
tom-toms, and cymbals. Her mouth moved and she was saying something but
the sound covered it.
Beatty knocked his pipe into the palm of his pink hand, studied the
ashes as if they were a symbol to be diagnosed, and searched for meaning.
"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, isn�t that right? 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."
"Yes."
Montag could lip-read what Mildred was saying in the doorway. He
tried not to look at her mouth, because then Beatty might turn and read what
was there, too.
"Colored people don�t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people
don�t feel good about Uncle Tom�s Cabin. Burn it. Someone�s written a
book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping?
Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside.
Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate
them, too. Five minutes after a person�s dead, he�s on his way to the Big
Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Then
minutes after death man�s a speck of black dust. Let�s not quibble over
individuals with memoriums. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and
fire is clean."
--
FABER
"You�re a hopeless romantic,� said Faber. �It would be funny if it were not
serious. It�s not books you need, it�s some of the thing that once were in
books. 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. Of course you couldn�t know this, of course you stil
can�t understand what I mena when I say all this. You are intuitively right,
that�s what counts. Three things are missing.
�Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important?
Because they have quality. And what doest he word quality mean? To me it
means texture. This pook has pores. It has features. This book can go under
the microscope. You�d find life under the glass, steaming past in infinite
profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per
square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more �literary� you are.
That�s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. 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.
�So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the
pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces,
preless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are
trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
Even fireworkds, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth.
Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworkds,
without completing the cycle back to reality. 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. If there isn�t something in that
legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane.
Well, there we have the first thing I said we need. Quality, texture of
information.�
�And the second?�
�Leisure.�
�Oh, but we�ve plenty of off-hours.�
�Off-hours, yes. 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!�
�Only the �family� is �people.��
�I beg pardon?�
�My wife says books aren�t �real.��
�Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, �Hold on a moment.�
You play God to it. But who ahs ever torn himself from the claw that
encloses you when yo udrop a seed in a TV parlor? It grow you any shape it
wishes! It is an evironment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth.
Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge adn
skepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece
symphony orchestra, full color, three dimesnios, and being in and part of thos
incredible parlors. As you see, my parlor is nothing but four plaster walls.
And here.� He held out two small rubber plugs. �For my ears when I ride the
subway jets.�
�Denham�s Dentifrice; they toil not, neither do they spin,� said
Montag, eyes shut. �Where do we go from here? Would books help us?�
�Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. 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. And I hardly think a very old man and a fireman
turned sour could do much this late in the game...�