Original "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, Part II

Montag did not look back at his wife as he went trembling along the hall to the kitchen, where he stood a long time watching the rain hit the windows before he came back down the hall in the grey light, waiting for the tremble to subside.

He stared at the parlour that was dead and grey as the waters of an ocean that might teem with life if they switched on the electronic sun.

The old man admitted to being a retired English professor who had been thrown out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage.

His name was Faber, and when he finally lost his fear of Montag, he talked in a cadenced voice, looking at the sky and the trees and the green park, and when an hour had passed he said something to Montag and Montag sensed it was a rhymeless poem.

In the hall Mildred's face was suffused with excitement.

Once as a child he had sat upon a yellow dune by the sea in the middle of the blue and hot summer day, trying to fill a sieve with sand, because some cruel cousin had said, “Fill this sieve and you'll get a dime!”

And the faster he poured, the faster it sifted through with a hot whispering.

The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass.

Behind him, the door to a bedroom stood open, and in that room a litter of machinery and steel tools was strewn upon a desktop.

Montag had only a glimpse, before Faber, seeing Montag's attention diverted, turned quickly and shut the bedroom door and stood holding the knob with a trembling hand.

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget.

This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion.

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

“It's an insidious plan, if I do say so myself.”

To see the firehouses burn across the land, destroyed as hotbeds of treason.

Faber opened the bedroom door and led Montag into a small chamber where stood a table upon which a number of metal tools lay among a welter of microscopic wire-hairs, tiny coils, bobbins, and crystals.

My cowardice is of such a passion, complementing the revolutionary spirit that lives in its shadow, I was forced to design this.

The moon rose in the sky as Montag walked, his lips moving just a trifle.

They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls of the house, and now they were screaming at each other above the din.

A minute later, three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other's limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter.

“He wasn't much, was he? Kind of small and homely and he didn't shave too close or comb his hair very well.”

“I'm going home,” quavered Mrs. Bowles.

He searched the house and found the books where Mildred had stacked them behind the refrigerator. Some were missing and he knew that she had started on her own slow process of dispersing the dynamite in her house, stick by stick.

It was good listening to the beetle hum, the sleepy mosquito buzz and delicate filigree murmur of the old man's voice at first scolding him and then consoling him in the late hour of night as he emerged from the steaming subway toward the firehouse world.

Don't haggle and nag them; you were so recently one of them yourself.

I must admit that your blind raging invigorated me. God, how young I felt!

Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me.

If you need help when Beatty pries at you, I'll be sitting right here in your eardrum making notes!

For these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with Job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands seemed gloved with blood.

Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning, we've cried.

But on the other hand: ‘Words are like leaves and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.’ Alexander Pope.

‘A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.’

You towered with rage, yelled quotes at me. I calmly parried every thrust.

...The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us...

Shall I talk some more? I like your look of panic. Swahili, Indian, English Lit., I speak them all. A kind of excellent dumb discourse, Willie!

...I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point!

And you got in and we drove back to the firehouse in beatific silence, all dwindled away to peace.

Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.

He glanced perfunctorily at it, and shoved it in his pocket.

Beatty's pink, phosphorescent cheeks glimmered in the high darkness, and he was smiling furiously.