Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

(1920-)

Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois in 1920. He graduated from a Los Angeles hi school in 1938. His formal education ended there, but he furthered it by himself − at night in the library and by day as the typewriter. He sold newspapers on Los Angeles street corners from 1938 to 1942, a modest beginning for a man whose name would one day be synonymous with the best in science fiction. Ray Bradbury sold his first science fiction short story in 1941, and 1 early reputation is based on stories published in the budding science fiction magazines of that time. Since the 1960s Bradbury has become less interested in fantasy and more in writing aboi the predicaments of ordinary people. His work was chosen for best American short story collections in 1946, 1948 and 1952. His awards include the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award in 1954 and the Aviation-Space Writer’s Association Award for be: space article in an American magazine in 1967. Mr. Bradbury has written for television, radio, the theatre and film, and he has been published in every major American magazine. Editions о his novels and shorter fiction span several continents and languages, and he has gained worldwide acceptance for his work. His titles include The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing The Body Electric, The Golden Apples of the Sun, Long After Midnight and The Toynbee Convector. Numerous films have been based on or inspired by Bradbury’s work.

Fahrenheit 451 is an anti-utopian novel and a warning. The action of the novel takes place in not very remote future, most likely at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Fahrenheit 451 the burning point of paper. In the world described in the novel people are allowed to think or know only what is presented by supertelevision. Books are forbidden. The ownership of book’ results in burning volumes and owners alike. The central character of the novel is Guy Montag an enthusiastic fireman, who gets acquainted with a girl from a relict family, cherishing old views and traditions. Against his own will and accepted views Montag begins to think.

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. When they reached her house all its lights were blazing.

“What’s going on? ” Montag had rarely seen that many house lights.

“Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It’s like being a pedestrian, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time-did I tell you? − for being a pedestrian. Oh, we’re most peculiar.”

“But what do you talk about? ”

She laughed at this. “Good night! ” She started up her walk. Then she seemed to remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. “Are you happy? ” she said.

“Am I what? ” he cried.

But she was gone − running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.

“Happy! Of all the nonsense.”

He stopped laughing.

He put his hand into the glove-hole of his front door and let it know his touch1.The front door slid open.

Of course I’m happy. What does she think? I’m not he asked the quiet rooms.

What a strange meeting on a strange night. He remembered nothing like it save one afternoon a year ago when he had met an old man in the park and they had talked....

Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl’s face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses but moving also toward a new sun.

“What? ” asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience.

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? People were more often − he searched for a simile, found one in his work − torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show, each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began. How long had they walked together? Three minutes? Five? Yet how large that time seemed now. How immense a figure she was on the stage before him; what a shadow she threw on the wall with her slender body! He felt that if his eye itched, she might blink. And if the muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he would.

Why, he thought, now that I think of it, she almost seemed to be waiting for me there, in the street, so damned late at night...

***

< … > He got up and put back the curtains and opened the windows wide to let the night air in. It was two o’clock in the morning. Was it only an hour ago, Clarisse McClellan in the street, and him coming in, and the dark room and his foot kicking the little crystal bottle? Only an hour, but the world had melted down and sprung up in a new and colourless form.

Laughter blew across the moon-coloured lawn from the house of Clarisse and her father and mother and the uncle who smiled so quietly and so earnestly. Above all, their laughter was relaxed and hearty and not forced in any way, coming from the house that was so brightly lit this late at night while all the other houses were kept to themselves in darkness. Montag heard the voices talking, talking, talking, giving, talking, weaving, reweaving their hypnotic web.

Montag moved out through the French windows and crossed the lawn, without even thinking of it. He stood outside the talking house in the shadows, thinking he might even tap on their door and whisper, “Let me come in. I won’t say anything, I just want to listen. What is it you’re saying? ”

But instead he stood there, very cold, his face a mask of ice, listening to a man’s voice (the uncle?) moving along at an easy pace:

“Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush. Everyone using everyone else’s coat-tails. How are you supposed to root for the home team when you don't even have a programme or know the names? For that matter, what colour jerseys are they wearing as they trot out on to the field? ”

Montag moved back to his own house, left the window wide, checked Mildred, tucked the covers about her carefully, and then lay down with the moonlight on his cheekbones and on the frowning ridges in his brow, with the moonlight distilled in each eye to form a silver cataract here.< … >

***

< … > One two three four five six seven days. And as many times he came out of the house and Clarisse was there somewhere in the world. Once he saw her shaking a walnut tree, once he saw her sitting on the lawn knitting a blue sweater, three or four times he found a bouquet of late flowers on his porch, or a handful of chestnuts in a little sack, or some autumn leaves neatly pinned to a sheet of white paper and thumb-tacked to his door. Every day Clarisse walked him to the corner. One day it was raining, the next it was clear, the day after that the wind blew strong, and the day after that it was mild and calm, and the day after that calm day was a day like a furnace of summer and Clarisse with her face ail sunburnt by late afternoon.

“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.”

“You make me feel very old and very much like a father.”

“Now you explain, ” she said, “why you haven’t any daughters like me, if you love children so much? ”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re joking! ”

“I mean” − He stopped and shook his head. “Well, my wife, she... she just never wanted any children at all.”

The girl stopped smiling. “I’m sorry. I really thought you were having fun at my expense. I’m a fool.”

“No, no, ” he said. “It was a good question. It’s been a long time since anyone cared enough to ask. A good question.”

“Let’s talk about something else. Have you ever smelled old leaves? Don’t they smell like cinnamon? Here. Smell.”

“Why, yes, it is like cinnamon in a way.”

She looked at him with her clear dark eyes. “You always seem shocked.”

“It’s just I haven’t had time − ”

“Did you look at the stretched-out billboards like I told you? ”

“I think so. Yes.” He had to laugh.

“Your laugh sounds much nicer than it did.”

“Does it? ”

“Much more relaxed.”

He felt at ease and comfortable. “Why aren’t you in school? I see you every day wandering around.”

“Oh, they don’t miss me, ” she said, “I’m anti-social, 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? Social to me means talking about things like this.” She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. “Or talking about how strange the world is. 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? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teaching. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break window panes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lamp-posts, playing ‘chicken’ and ’knock hubcaps. 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.”

“Sometimes I’m ancient. I’m afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I’m afraid of them and they don’t like me because I’m afraid. My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn’t kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility, my uncle says. Do you know, I’m responsible. I was spanked when I needed it, years ago. And I do all the shopping and house-cleaning by hand.

“But most of all, ” she said, “I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they’re going. Sometimes I even go to the Fun Parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don’t care as long as they’re insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what? ”

“What? ”

“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. And most of the time in the cafes they have the joke-boxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the coloured patterns running up and down, but it’s only colour and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That’s all there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back sometimes pictures said things or even showed people.”

“Your uncle said, your uncle said. Your uncle must be a remarkable man.”

“He is. He certainly is. Well, I’ve got to be going. Goodbye, Mr. Montag.”

“Good-bye.”

…And then, Clarisse was gone. He didn’t know what there was about the afternoon, but it was not seeing her some­where in the world. The lawn was empty, the trees empty, the street empty, and while at first he did not even know he missed her or was even looking for her, the fact was that by the time he reached the subway, there were vague stirrings of un-ease in him. Something was the matter, his routine had been disturbed. A simple routine, true, established in a short few days, and yet...? He almost turned back to make the walk again, to give her time to appear. He was certain if he tried the same route, everything would work out fine. But it was late, and the arrival of his train put a stop to his plan.