A Pleasure to Burn

by Ray Bradbury

  “WHAT’S WRONG, ISN’T IT ALL RIGHT?” asked Montag.

  “Better than all right, perfect. Mr. Montag, you have hit upon the secret of our organization. Living books, Mr. Montag, living books. Inside the old skull where no one can see.” He turned to Simmons. “Do we have a book of Job?”

  “Only one. A man named Harris in Youngstown.”

  “Mr. Montag.” The man reached out and held Montag’s shoulder firmly. “Walk slowly, and carefully, and take care of yourself. If anything should happen to Harris, you are the book of Job. Do you see how important you are?”

  “It scares the hell out of me. At first I didn’t remember, and then, tonight, on the river, it suddenly came back, all of it.”

  “Good. Many people are fast studies but don’t know it. Some of God’s simplest creatures have the ability called eidetic memory, the ability to remember entire pages of print at one glance. It has nothing to do with IQ. No offense, Mr. Montag. It varies. Would you like, one day, to read Plato’s Republic?”

  “Of course.”

  Stewart gestured to a man who had been sitting to one side. “Mr. Plato, if you please.”

  The man began to talk. He stared into the fire idly, his hands filling a corncob pipe, unaware of the words tumbling from his lips. He talked for two minutes without a pause.

  Stewart made the smallest move of his hand and the man stopped. “Perfect word for word memory, every word important, every word Plato’s,” said Stewart.

  “And,” said the man who was Plato, “I don’t understand a damned word of it. I just say it. It’s up to you to understand.”

  “None of it?”

  “None. But I can’t get it out. Once it’s in, it’s like glue in a bottle, there for good. Mr. Stewart says it’s important, that’s good enough for me.”

  “We’re old friends,” said Stewart. “Grew up together. Met a few years ago on that track, somewhere between here and Seattle, walking, me running away from the firemen, him away from cities.”

  “Never liked cities. I always felt that cities owned men, that was all, and used men to keep themselves going, to keep machines oiled and dusted, so I got out. And then I met Stewart and he found out I had this eidetic memory as he calls it, and he gave me a book to read and then we burned the book so we wouldn’t be caught with it, and now I’m Plato, that’s what I am.”

  “He is also Socrates.”

  The man bowed.

  “And Schopenhauer.”

  The man nodded again.

  “And Nietzsche.”

  “All that in one bottle,” said the man. “You wouldn’t think there was room. But I can open my mind up like a concertina, and play it. There’s plenty of room if you don’t try to think about what you read, it’s when you start thinking that all of a sudden it’s crowded. I don’t think about anything except eating and sleeping and traveling. There’s plenty of room.”

  “So here we are, Plato and his confreres in this man, Mr. Simmons in really Mr. Donne, Mr. Darwin and Mr. Aristophanes. These other gentlemen are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we are not without humor, despite this melancholy age, and I’m bits and pieces, snatches of Byron and Shaw and Washington and Galileo and DaVinci and Washington Irving. A kaleidoscope. Hold me up to the sun and give me a shake. And you are Mr. Job, and in half an hour or more, a war will begin, while those people in the anthill across the river have been busy with chasing Montag, the war has been getting underway. By this time tomorrow the world will belong to the little green towns and the rusted railroad tracks and the men walking the ties, that’s us. The cities will be soot and ash and baking powder.”

  The TV set rang a bell. “Final negotiations are now arranged for a conference tomorrow with the leaders of the enemy government, too—”

  Stewart switched it off.

  “Well, what do you think, Mr. Montag?”

  “It’s amazing, it’s not to be believed. I was pretty blind, trying to go at it the way I did, planting books and calling firemen.”

  “You did what you thought you had to do. But our way simply is better to keep the knowledge intact and not get excited or mad, but just wait quietly until the machines are dented junk, and then step up and say, here we are, we’ve been waiting and now you’ve come to your senses, civilized man, perhaps a book will do you good.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Thousands on the road, on the rails, just bums on the outside, libraries on the inside. It wasn’t really planned, it grew. Each man had a book he wanted to remember. He did. Then we discovered each other and made the plan. Some of us live in small towns across the country. Chapter one of Walden in Nantucket, chapter two in Rhode Island, chapter three in Waukesha, chapter four and five in Tucson, each according to his ability, some people can memorize a lot, some only a few lines.”

  “The books are safe then.”

  “Couldn’t be safer. Why, there’s one little village of 200 people in North Carolina, no bomb’ll ever touch it, which is the complete Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. You could pick the people up and flip them like pages, almost, a page to a person. People who wouldn’t dream of being seen with a book, gladly memorized a page. You couldn’t be caught with that. And when the war’s over and we have the time and need, the books will be written again, the people will be called in one by one to recite what they know and it’ll be in print again until another Dark Age when maybe we’ll have to do the whole damned thing over again, man being the fool he is.”

  “What do we do tonight?” asked Montag.

  “Just wait, that’s all.”

  “Not anymore,” said Simmons. “Look.”

  But even as he said it, it was over and done, the war.

  Montag glanced up.

  THE BOMBS BEGAN TO FALL ON THE CITY. They stood in the sky as if someone had thrown up a handful of wheat grains and they were balanced there for a moment between the buildings and the stars, and then they fell down. They picked the buildings apart, separated windows from doors, beams from jousts, roofs from walls, and people from bricks, then put them all back together again in a powdery heap. The sound came after this.

  “Isn’t it funny,” said Mr. Bedloe at the fire, watching. “Man comes along and throws stones and cement and water into a concrete mixer and pours it and it’s a city, then he comes along with the biggest damn concrete mixer of all time and throws the city back into it and grinds it around and you’ve got stones and dust and water again.”

  “My wife’s somewhere in that city,” said Montag.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  The city took another flight of bombs. Now it was burning.

  “As I was saying,” said Mr. Bedloe. “It all has to come down. There it is, coming down fast. And here we are, waiting for it to finish falling.”

  “I wonder if she’s all right,” said Montag.

  “Whatever she is now she’s better than she was,” said Bedloe. “Being dead is better than being dull, being dead is better than not being aware.”

  “I hope she’s alive.”

  “She’ll be fretting tomorrow because the television isn’t on. Not because the city’s dead, no, or the people, but because she’ll be missing Zack Zack, the greatest comedian of all time.”

  The bombardment was finished and over, even while the seeds were in the windy sky, even while they drifted with dreadful slowness down upon a city where all of the people looked up at their destiny coming upon them like the lid of a dream shutting tight and becoming an instant later a red and powdery nightmare, the bombardment to all intents and purposes was finished, for once the ships had sighted their target and alerted their bombardier at three thousand miles an hour, as quick as the whisper of a knife through the sky, the war was finished; once the trigger was pulled, once the bombs took flight, it was over. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone, around the visible world, it seemed, like bullets a caveman might not believe in because they
remain unseen, but nevertheless the heart is suddenly struck, the body falls into separate divisions, the blood is astounded to be free on the air, and the brain gives up all its precious memories, and still puzzled, dies.

  This war was not to be believed. It was a gesture. It was the flirt of a great metal hand over the city and a voice saying, “Disintegrate. Leave not one stone upon another. Perish. Die.”

  Montag held the bombs in the sky for a precious moment, with his mind and his hands. “Run,” he cried to Faber. To Clarisse: “Run, get out, get out!” But Faber was out. There, in the deep valleys of the country, went the dawn train on its way from one desolation to another. Though the desolation had not yet arrived, was still in the air, it was as certain as man could make it. Before the train had gone another fifty yards on the track, its destination would be meaningless, its point of departure made from a metropolis into a yard, and in that metropolis now, in the half second left, as the bombs perhaps were three inches, three small inches shy of her hotel building, Montag could see Mildred, leaning into the TV set as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there, leaning anxiously, nervously into that tubular world as into a crystal ball to find happiness. The first bomb struck. Perhaps the television station went first into oblivion. Montag saw the screen go dark in Mildred’s face and her screaming, because, in the next millionth part of time remaining, Mildred would see her own face reflected there, hungry and alone, in a mirror instead of a crystal, and it would be such a wildly empty face that she would at last recognize it, and stare at the ceiling almost with welcome as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon her and carried her with a million pounds of brick, metal and people down into the cellar, there to dispose of them in its unreasonable way.

  Montag found himself on his face. The concussion had knocked the air across the river, and turned the men down like dominoes in a line, blown out the fire like a last candle, and caused the trees to mourn with a great voice of wind passing away south. Montag raised his head. Now the city, instead of the bombs, was in the air, they had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gusts of dust and sparkles of torn metal into a city not unlike the shakings of a kaleidoscope in a giant hand, now one pattern, now another, but all of it formed of flame and steel and stone, a door where a window ought to be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead. The sound of its death came after.

  “THERE,” SAID THE STRANGER.

  The men lay like gasping fish on the grass.

  They did not get up for a long time, but held to the earth as children hold to a familiar thing, no matter how cold or dead, no matter what has happened or will happen, their fingers were clawed into the soil, and they were all shouting to keep their ears in balance and open, Montag shouting with them, a protest against the wind that swept over them and made their noses bleed. Montag watched the blood drip into the earth with such an abstraction that the city was forgotten.

  The wind died.

  The city was flat as if one took a heaping tablespoon of baking powder and passed one finger over it, smoothing it to an even level.

  The man said nothing. They lay awhile like people on the dawn edge of sleep, not yet ready to arise and begin the day with its obligations, its fires and foods, its thousand details of putting foot after foot, hand after hand, its deliveries and functions and minute obsessions. They lay blinking their stunned eyelids. You could hear them breathing faster, then slower, then slow.

  Montag sat up but did not move farther. The other men did likewise, sun was touching the horizon with a faint red tip. The air was cool and sweet and smelled of rain. In a few minutes it would smell of dust and pulverized iron, but now it was sweet.

  Silently, the leader of the small group arose, felt his arms and legs, touched his face to see if everything was in its place, then shuffled over to the blown-out fire and bent over it. Montag watched. Striking a match, the man touched it to a piece of paper and shoved this under a bit of kindling, placed together tiny bits of straw and dry kindling, and after a while, drawing the men slowly, awkwardly to it, the fire was licking up, coloring their faces pink and yellow, while the sun rose slowly to color their backs.

  There was no sound except the low and secret talk of men at morning, and the talk was this:

  “How many strips?”

  “Two each.”

  The bacon was counted out on a wax paper. The frying pan was set to the fire and the bacon laid in it. After a moment it began to flutter and dance in the pan and the sputter of it filled the morning air with its aroma. Eggs were cracked in upon the bacon and the men watched this ritual, for the leader was a participant, as were they, in a religion of early rising, a thing man had done for many centuries, and Montag felt at ease, among them, as if during the night the walls of a great jail had vaporized around them and they were on the land again and only the birds sang on or off as they pleased, no schedule, and no insistence.

  “Here,” said the old man, dishing out the bacon and eggs to each from the hot pan.

  And then, without looking up, breaking fresh eggs into the pan, the leader, slowly, and with a concern both for what he said, recalling it, rounding it, but careful of making the food also began to recite snatches and rhythms, even while the day brightened all about as if a pink lamp had been given more wick, and Montag listened and they all looked at the tin plates in their hands, waiting a moment for the eggs to cool, while the leader started the routine, and others took it up, here or there, about, and when it was Montag’s turn he spoke, too:

  “Thy days are as grass …”

  “To be or not to be, that is the question …”

  The bacon sputtered.

  “She walks in beauty like the night …”

  “Behold, the lilies of the fields …”

  The forks moved in the pink light.

  “They, oil not, neither do they spin …”

  The sun was fully up.

  “Oh, do you remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt … ?”

  Montag felt fine.

  The Fireman

  Fire, Fire, Burn Books

  THE FOUR MEN SAT SILENTLY PLAYING BLACKJACK UNDER a green drop-light in the dark morning. Only a voice whispered from the ceiling:

  “One thirty-five a.m. Thursday morning, October 4th, 2052, A.D… . One forty a.m… . one fifty …”

  Mr. Montag sat stiffly among the other firemen in the fire house, heard the voice-clock mourn out the cold hour and the cold year, and shivered.

  The other three glanced up.

  “What’s wrong, Montag?”

  A radio hummed somewhere. “War may be declared any hour. This country is ready to defend its destiny and …”

  The fire house trembled as five hundred jet-planes screamed across the black morning sky.

  The firemen slumped in their coal-blue uniforms, with the look of thirty years in their blue-shaved, sharp, pink faces and their burnt-colored hair. Stacked behind them were glittering piles of auxiliary helmets. Downstairs in concrete dampness the fire monster itself slept, the silent dragon of nickel and tangerine colors, the boa-constrictor hoses, the twinkling brass.

  “I’m thinking of our last job,” said Mr. Montag.

  “Don’t,” said Leahy, the fire chief.

  “That poor man, when we burned his library. How would it feel if firemen burned our houses and our books?”

  “We haven’t any books.”

  “But if we did have some.”

  “You got some?”

  “No.”

  Montag gazed beyond them to the wall and the typed lists of a million forbidden books. The titles cringed in fire, burning down the years under his ax and his fire hose spraying not water but—kerosene!

  “Was it always like this?” asked Mr. Montag. “The fire house, our duties. I mean, well,
once upon a time …”

  “Once upon a time?” Leahy crowed. “What kind of language is that?”

  Fool! cried Mr. Montag to himself. You’ll give yourself away! The last fire. A book of fairy tales. He had dared to read a line or so. “I mean,” he said quickly, “in the old days, before homes were completely fireproof, didn’t firemen ride to fires to put them out, instead of start them.”

  “I never knew that.” Stoneman and Black drew forth their rule books and laid them where Montag, though long familiar with them, might read:

  1. Answer the alarm quickly.

  2. Start the fire swiftly.

  3. Be sure you burn everything.

  4. Report back to the fire house.

  5. Stand alert for another alarm.

  EVERYONE WATCHED MONTAG.

  He swallowed. “What will they do to that old man we caught last night with his books?”

  “Insane asylum.”

  “But he wasn’t insane!”

  “Any man’s insane who thinks he can hide books from the government or us.” Leahy blew a great fiery cloud of cigar smoke from his thin mouth. He idled back.

  The alarm sounded.

  The bell kicked itself two hundred times in a few seconds. Suddenly there were three empty chairs. The cards fell in a snow flurry. The brass pole trembled. The men were gone, their hats with them. Montag still sat. Below, the orange dragon coughed to life.

  Montag slid down the pole like a man in a dream.

  “Montag, you forgot your hat!”

  He got it and they were off, the night wind hammering about their siren noise and their mighty metal thunder.

  It was a flaking three-story house in the old section of town. A century old if it was a day, but, like every house, it had been given a thin fireproof plastic coat fifty years ago, and this preservative shell seemed to be holding it up.

  “Here we are!”

  The engine slammed to a stop. Leahy, Stoneman, and Black ran up the sidewalk, suddenly odious and fat in their plump slickers. Montag followed.