A Pleasure to Burn (21 page)

“Maybe.”

“It started in the early 1900s, I'd say. After the Civil War maybe. Photography invented. Fast print presses. Films. Television. Things began to have mass, Montag, mass.”

“I see.”

“And because they had mass, they had to become simpler. Books now. Once they appealed to various bits of people here and there. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. Plenty of room for elbows and differentness, right?”

“Right.”

“But then the world got full of mass and elbows. And things for lots of millions of people had to be simple. Films and radio and TV and big big magazines had to be a sort of paste-pudding norm, you might say. Follow me?”

“I think.”

“Picture it. The nineteenth century man with his horses and books and leisure. You might call him the Slow Motion man. Everyone taking a year to sit down, get up, jump a fence. Then, in the Twentieth Century you speed up the camera.”

“A good simile.”

“Splendid. Books get shorter. Condensations appear. Tabloids. Radio programs simplify. The exquisite pantomime of great actors become the pratfall. Everything sublimates itself to the joke, the gag, the snap ending. Everything is sacrificed for pace.”

“Pace.” Mildred smiled.

“Great classics are cut to fit a fifteen minute show, then a two minute Book column, then a two line Dictionary resume. Magazines become picture books! Out of the nursery to the college back to the nursery, in a few short centuries!”

Mildred got up. She was losing the thread of the talk, Montag knew, and when this happened, she began to fiddle with things. She went about the room, cleaning up. Leahy ignored her.

“Faster and faster the film, Mr. Montag, quick! Men over hurdles, dogs over stiles, horses over fences! CLICK? PIC, LOOK, EYE, NOW? FLICK, HERE, THERE? QUICK, WHY, HOW, WHO, EH?, Mr. Montag! The world's political affairs become one paper column, a sentence, a headline. Then, in mid-air, vanishes. Look at your man now, quick over hurdles, over stile, horse over fence so swift you can't see the blur. And the mind of man, whirling so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broad-casters that the centrifuge throws off all ideas! He is unable to concentrate.”

Mildred was smoothing the bed now. Montag felt panic as she approached his pillow to straighten it. The book was behind the pillow! And she would pull it out, not knowing, of course, in front of Leahy!

“School is shortened. Short cuts are made, philosophies and languages dropped. English dropped. Spelling dropped. Life is immediate. The job is what counts. Why learn anything except how to work your hands, press a button, pull a switch, fit a bolt?”

“Yes,” quavered Montag.

“Let me fix your pillow,” said Mildred, smiling.

“No,” whispered Montag.

“The button is replaced by the zipper. Does a man have time to think while he dresses, a philosophical time, in the morning.”

“He does not,” said Montag, automatically.

Mildred pulled at the pillow.

“Get away,” said Montag.

“Life becomes one Big Prat Fall, Mr. Montag. No more of the subtleties, everything is bang and boff and wow!”

“Wow,” said Mildred, yanking at the pillow.

“For God's sake, leave me alone,” said Montag. Leahy stared at him.

Mildred's hand was thrusting behind him.

“The theatres are empty, Mr. Montag. Something that was getting meaningless is replaced by something evermore massive and meaningless, the television set, and after that The Clam.”

“What's this?” said Mildred. Montag crushed back against her hand. “What've you got hidden here?”

“Go sit down,” he screamed at her. She drew back, her hand empty. “We're talking.”

“As I was saying,” said Leahy. “Cartoons everywhere. Books become cartoons. The mind drinks in less and less. Impatience. Nervous impatience. Time to kill. No work. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, anywhere, nowhere. Impatience to be somewhere they are not, not where they are. The gasoline refugee, towns becoming almost exclusively motels. And people in vast nomadic moves from city to city, impatient, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept last night and I slept the night before.”

Mildred went in the other room and shut the door. She turned on the radio.

“Go on,” said Montag.

“Along with the technological rush, there was the minority problem. The bigger a population, the more minorities. It's hard to find a majority in a big mass. And since the Mass Market was with us there were ten thousand minorities, union minorities, church minorities, racial minorities, dog lovers, cat lovers.”

“Professional Irishmen, Texans, Brooklynites,” suggested Mr. Montag, sweating. He leaned back hard on the hidden book.

“Right. Swedes, Britons, French, people from Oregon, Illinois, Mexico. You couldn't have doctors as villains, or lawyers, or merchants or chiefs. The UN prevented your doing films on past wars. The Dog Protectors had to be pleased and bull fights were banished. All the minorities with their own little navels that had to be kept clean. Intelligent men gave up in disgust.

“Pictures became puddings. Magazines were tapioca. The book buyer, the ticket buyer bored by dishwater, his brain spinning, quit buying, the trades died a slow death. There you have it. Don't blame the government. Technology coupled with mass exploitation, coupled with censorship from minorities. All you've got today to read is comic books, confessions, and trade journals.”

“I know,” said Montag.

“The psychologists killed off Edgar Allan Poe, said his stories were bad for the mind. They killed off fairy tales, too. Fantasy. Not facing facts, they said.”

“But why the firemen,” said Montag at last. “Why all the fear and the prejudice and the burning and killing now?”

“Ah,” said Leahy, leaning forward to finish. “Books went out of fashion. Minority groups in order to insure their security made sure the censorship was fastened tight. Psychiatrists helped. They needn't have bothered. By that time people were uneducated. They stayed away from books, and, in ignorance, hated and feared them. You always fear something you don't know. Men have been burned at the stake for centuries, for knowing too much.”

“Yes,” said Montag. “The worst thing you can call a man today is a ‘professor' or ‘intellectual.' It's a swear word.”

“Intelligence is suspect, for good reason. The little man fears someone'll put something over on him as does the big man. So the best thing is to keep everybody as dumb as everybody else. The little man wants you and me to be like him. Rewrite the slogan. Not everyone born free and equal, but everyone
made
equal. Crush the IQs down to the sub-norm. A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shout out of the weapon. Unbreach men's minds. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man. And so, the Fire Men came into being. You, Mr. Montag, and me.”

Leahy stood up. “I've got to go.”

“Thanks for talking to me.”

“You needed to be put straight. Now that you understand it, you'll see our civilization, because it's so big, has to be placid. We can't have minorities stirred and upset. People must be content, Mr. Montag. Books upset them. Colored people who don't like
Little Black Sambo
are unhappy. So we burn
Little Black Sambo
. White people who read
Uncle Tom's Cabin
are unhappy. We burn that, too. Keep everyone calm and happy. That's the trick.”

Leahy walked over and shook Mr. Montag's hand.

“One more thing.”

“Yes.”

“Every fireman gets curious.”

“I imagine.”

“What do the books say, he wonders. A good question. They say nothing, Mr. Montag, nothing you can touch or believe in. They're about people who never existed. Figments of the mind. Can you trust figments? No. Figments and confusion. But anyway, a fireman steals a book at a fire, almost by accident, a copy of the Bible, perhaps. A natural thing.”

“Natural.”

“We allow for that. We let him keep it 24 hours. If he hasn't burned it by then, we burn it for him.”

“Thanks,” said Mr. Montag.

“I think you have a special edition of this one book the Bible, haven't you?”

Montag felt his mouth move. “Yes.”

“You'll be at work tonight at six o'clock?”

“No,” said Montag.

“What!”

Montag shut his eyes and opened them. “I'll be in later, maybe.”

“See that you do,” said Leahy, smiling. “And bring the book with you, then, eh, after you've looked it over?”

“I'll never come in again,” yelled Montag, in his mind.

“Get well,” said Leahy, and went out.

He watched Leahy drive away in his gleaming beetle the color of the last fire they had set.

Mildred was listening to the radio in the front room.

Montag cleared his throat in the door. She didn't look up, but laughed at something the radio announcer said.

“It's only a step,” said Montag. “From not going to work today to not going tomorrow, and then not for a year.”

“What do you want for lunch?” asked Mildred.

“How can you be hungry at a time like this!”

“You're going to work tonight, aren't you?”

“I'm doing more than that,” he said. “I'm going to start killing people and raving and buying books!”

“A one man revolution?” she said, lightly. “They'd put you in jail.”

“That's not a bad idea.” He put his clothes on, furiously, walking about the bedroom. “But I'd kill a few people before I did get locked up. There's a real bastard, that Leahy, did you
hear
him? Knows all the answers, but does nothing about it!”

“I won't have anything to do with all this junk,” she said.

“No?” he said. “This is your house, isn't it, as well as mine?”

“Yes.”

“Then look at this!”

She watched as he ran into the hall, peered up at a little ceiling vent. He got a chair and climbed up and opened the vent. Reaching in, he began tossing books, big books, little books, red, yellow, green, black-covered books, ten, thirty, forty of them into the parlor at her feet. “There,” he cried. “So you're not in this with me? You're in it up to your neck!”

“Leonard!” She stood looking at them. She looked at the house, the furniture. “They'll burn our house down if they find these, and put us in jail for life or kill us.” She edged away, wailing.

“Let them try!”

She hesitated, and then in one motion bent and threw a book at the fireplace.

He caught her, shrieking, and took another book from her hand. “Oh, no, Millie, no. Never touch these books. If you do I'll give you the beating of your life.” He shook her. “Listen.” He held her very firmly and her face bobbed; tears streaked down her rouged cheeks. “You're going to help me. You're in it now. You're going to read a book, one of these. Sit down. I'll help you. You're going to do something with me about men like Leahy and this city we live in. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear.” Her body was sagging.

The door bell rang.

They both jerked about to glance at the door and the books strewn about in heaps.

The door bell rang again.

“Sit down.” Montag pushed his wife gently into the chair. He handed her a book.

The bell rang a third time.

“Read.” He pointed to a page. “Out loud.”

“The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright.”

The bell sounded.

“Go on.”

“But the mouth of fools poureth out foolishness.”

Another ring.

“They'll go away after a while,” said Montag.

“A wholesome tongue is a tree of life.”

In the distance, Montag thought he heard a fire siren.

 

The Sieve and the Sand

 

T
HEY READ THE LONG AFTERNOON THROUGH, WHILE THE
fire flickered and blew the hearth and the rain fell from the sky over the house. Now and again, Mr. Montag would quietly light a cigarette and puff it, or go bring in a bottle of cold beer and drink it easily or say, “Will you read that part over again? Isn't that an idea now?” And Mildred's voice, as colorless as a beer bottle which contains a beautiful wine but does not know it, went on enclosing the words in plain glass, pouring forth the beauties with a loose mouth, while her drab eyes moved over the words and over the words and the cigarette smoke idled, and the hour grew late. They read a man named Shakespeare and a man named Poe and part of a book by a man named Matthew and one named Mark. On occasion, Mildred glanced fearfully at the window.