Ray Bradbury 3-Book Collection: Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man

‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag found himself on his feet, the shocked inhabitants of the loud car staring, moving back from this man with the insane, gorged face, the gibbering, dry mouth, the flapping book in his fist. The people who had been sitting a moment before, tapping their feet to the rhythm of Denham’s Dentifrice, Denham’s Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham’s Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice, one two, one two three, one two, one two three. The people whose mouths had been faintly twitching the words Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice. The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run; the great air-train fell down its shaft in the earth.

‘Lilies of the field.’

‘Denham’s.’

‘Lilies, I said!’

The people stared.

‘Call the guard.’

‘The man’s off –’

‘Knoll View!’

The train hissed to its stop.

‘Knoll View!’ A cry.

‘Denham’s.’ A whisper.

Montag’s mouth barely moved. ‘Lilies …’

The train door whistled open. Montag stood. The door gasped, started shut. Only then did he leap past the other passengers, screaming in his mind, plunge through the slicing door only in time. He ran on the white tiles up through the tunnels, ignoring the escalators, because he wanted to feel his feet move, arms swing, lungs clench, unclench, feel his throat go raw with air. A voice drifted after him, ‘Denham’s Denham’s Denham’s,’ the train hissed like a snake. The train vanished in its hole.

‘Who is it?’

‘Montag out here.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Let me in.’

‘I haven’t done anything!’

‘I’m alone, dammit!’

‘You swear it?’

‘I swear!’

The front door opened slowly. Faber peered out, looking very old in the light and very fragile and very much afraid. The old man looked as if he had not been out of the house in years. He and the white plaster walls inside were much the same. There was white in the flesh of his mouth and his cheeks and his hair was white and his eyes had faded, with white in the vague blueness there. Then his eyes touched on the book under Montag’s arm and he did not look so old any more and not quite so fragile. Slowly his fear went.

‘I’m sorry. One has to be careful.’

He looked at the book under Montag’s arm and could not stop. ‘So it’s true.’

Montag stepped inside. The door shut.

‘Sit down.’ Faber backed up, as if he feared the book might vanish if he took his eyes from it. Behind him, the door to a bedroom stood open, and in that room a litter of machinery and steel tools were strewn upon a desktop. Montag had only a glimpse, before Faber, seeing Montag’s attention diverted, turned quicly and shut the bedroom door and stood holding the knob with a trembling hand. His gaze returned unsteadily to Montag, who was now seated with the book in his lap. ‘The book – where did you –?’

‘I stole it.’

Faber, for the first time, raised his eyes and looked directly into Montag’s face. ‘You’re brave.’

‘No,’ said Montag. ‘My wife’s dying. A friend of mine’s already dead. Someone who may have been a friend was burnt less than twenty-four hours ago. You’re the only one I knew might help me. To see. To see …’

Faber’s hands itched on his knees. ‘May I?’

‘Sorry.’ Montag gave him the book.

‘It’s been a long time. I’m not a religious man. But it’s been a long time.’ Faber turned the pages, stopping here and there to read. ‘It’s as good as I remember. Lord, how they’ve changed it in our “parlours” these days. Christ is one of the “family” now. I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He’s a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn’t making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshipper absolutely needs.’ Faber sniffed the book. ‘Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.’ Faber turned the pages. ‘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.’ Faber closed the Bible. ‘Well – suppose you tell me why you came here?’

‘Nobody listens any more. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.’

Faber examined Montag’s thin, blue-jowled face. ‘How did you get shaken up? What knocked the torch out of your hands?’

‘I don’t know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.’

‘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 things that once were in books. The same things could be in the “parlour 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 still can’t understand what I mean when I say 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 does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming 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 only wax moon faces, poreless, 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 fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, 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 mid-air, 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 needed. 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 your 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 has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours. As you see, my parlour 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 …’

‘I can get books.’

‘You’re running a risk.’