by Ray Bradbury
“I don’t mind.”
“Why do you do what you do?”
But before he knew what she meant or could make a reply, she had run off, embarrassed at her own frankness.
“What did she mean, why do I do what I do?” he said to himself. “I’m a fireman, of course. I burn books. Is that what she meant?”
He didn’t see Clarisse for a month. He watched for her each day, but made no point of her absence to his wife. He wanted to go rap on her parents’ door, but decided against it; he didn’t want them misunderstanding his interest in the child. But after thirty-six days had passed, he brought Clarisse’s name up offhand.
“Oh, her?” said Mildred, with the radio music jarring the table plates. “Why, didn’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“She was killed by an automobile a month ago.”
“A month! But why didn’t someone tell me!”
“Didn’t I? I suppose it slipped my mind. Yes, a car hit her.”
“Did they find whose car it was?”
“No. You know how those things are. What do you want for supper, frozen steak or chops?”
And so Clarisse was dead. No, disappeared! For in a large city you didn’t die, you simply vanished. No one missed you, no one saw you go; your death was as insignificant as that of a butterfly carried secretly away, caught in the radiator grille of a speeding car.
And with Clarisse’s death, half of the world was dead, and the other half was instantly revealed to him for what it was.
He saw what Mildred was and always would be, what he himself was but didn’t want to be any more. And he saw that it was no idle thing, Mildred’s suicide attempts, the lovely dark girl with the flowers being ground under a car; it was a thing of the world they lived in. It was a part of the screaming, pressing down of people into electric molds. It was the meaningless flight of civilization down a rotary track to smash its own senseless tail. Mildred’s flight was trying to die and escape nothingness, whereas Clarisse had been fighting nothingness with something, with being aware instead of forgetting, with walking instead of sitting, with going to get life instead of having it brought to her.
And the civilization had killed her for her trouble. Not purposely, no, but with a fine ironic sense, for no purpose at all. Killed by a vanilla-faced idiot racing nowhere for nothing and irritated that he had been detained 120 seconds while the police investigated and released him on his way to some distant base that he must tag frantically before running for home.
Montag felt the slow gathering of awareness. Mildred, Clarisse. The firemen. The murdering children. Last night, the old man’s books burned and him in an asylum. Tonight, that woman burned before his eyes. It was such a nightmare that only another nightmare, less horrible, could be used to escape from it, and Clarisse had died weeks ago and he had not seen her die, which made it somehow crueler and yet more bearable.
“Clarisse. Clarisse.”
Montag lay all night long, thinking, smelling the smoke on his hands, in the dark.
HE HAD CHILLS AND FEVER IN THE MORNING.
“You can’t be sick,” said Mildred.
He closed his eyes upon the hotness. “Yes.”
“But you were all right last night.”
“No, I wasn’t all right.” He heard the radio in the parlor. Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there; he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burned by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of mental cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like raw milk. He could remember her no other way.
“Will you bring me an analgesic and water?”
“You’ve got to get up,” she said. “It’s noon. You’ve slept five hours later than usual.”
“Will you turn the radio off?” he asked
“That’s my favorite program.”
“Will you turn it off for a sick man?”
“I’ll turn it down.”
She went out of the room and did nothing to the radio and came back. “Is that better?”
“Thanks.”
“That’s my favorite program,” she repeated, as if she had not said it a thousand times before.
“What about the analgesic?”
“You’ve never been sick before.” She went away again.
“Well, I’m sick now. I’m not going to work tonight. Call Leahy for me.”
“You acted funny last night.” She returned, humming.
“Where’s the analgesic?” He glanced at the water glass.
“Oh.” She walked to the bath again. “Did something happen?”
“A fire, that’s all.”
“I had a nice evening,” she said, in the bathroom.
“What doing?”
“Television.”
“What was on.”
“Programs.”
“What programs?”
“Some of the best ever.
“Who?”
“Oh, you know, the big shows.”
“Yes, the big shows, big, big, big.” He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odor of kerosene made him vomit.
Mildred came in, humming. She was surprised. “Why’d you do that?”
He looked with dismay at the floor. “We burned an old woman with her books.”
“It’s a good thing the rug’s washable.” She fetched a mop and swabbed clumsily at it. “I went to Helen’s last night.”
“Couldn’t you get the shows on your own TV?”
“Sure, but it’s nice visiting.”
“Did Helen get over that finger infection?”
“I didn’t notice.”
SHE WENT OUT INTO THE LIVING ROOM. He heard her by the radio, singing.
“Mildred,” he called.
She returned, singing, snapping her fingers softly.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about last night?” he said.
“What about it?”
“We burned a thousand books and a woman.”
“Forbidden books.”
The radio was exploding in the parlor.
“Yes: copies of Plato and Socrates and Marcus Aurelius.”
“Foreigners?”
“Something like that.”
“Then they were radicals?”
“All foreigners can’t be radicals.”
“If they wrote books, they were.” Mildred fiddled with the telephone. “You don’t expect me to call Mr. Leahy, do you?”
“You must!”
“Don’t shout.”
“I wasn’t shouting!” he cried. He was up in bed, suddenly, enraged and flushed, shaking. The radio roared in the hot air. “I can’t call him. I can’t tell him I’m sick.”
“Why?”
“Because …”
Because you’re afraid, he thought, pretending illness, afraid to call Leahy because after a moment’s discussion the conversation would run so: “Yes, Mr. Leahy, I feel better already. I’ll be in at ten o’clock tonight.”
“You’re not sick,” she said.
Montag fell back in bed. He reached under his pillow and groped for the hidden book. It was still there.
“Mildred, how would it be if—well, maybe I quit my job a while?”
“You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one night, some woman and her books—”
“You should have seen her, Millie!”
“She’s nothing to me. She shouldn’t have had books. It was her responsibility; she should’ve thought of that. I hate her. She’s got you going and next you know we’ll be out, no house, no job, nothing.”
“You weren’t there. You didn’t see,” he said. “There must be something in books, whole worlds we don’t dream about, to make a woman stay in a burning house. There must be something fine there. You don’t stay and burn for nothing.”
“She was simple-minded.”
“She was as rational as you or
I, and we burned her!”
“That’s water under the bridge.”
“No, not water, Millie, but fire. You ever see a burned house? It smolders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me half a century. My God, I’ve been trying put it out, in my mind, all night, and I’m crazy with trying!”
“You should’ve thought of that before becoming a fireman.”
“THOUGHT!” HE SAID. “Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can’t afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I’ve done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep, I followed them.”
The radio was playing a dance tune.
“I’ve been killing the brain of the world for ten years, pouring kerosene on it. Millie, a book is a brain. It isn’t only that woman we destroyed, or others like her, in these years, but it’s the thoughts I burned and never knew it.”
He got out of bed.
“It took some man a lifetime to put some of his thoughts on paper, looking after all the beauty and goodness in life, and then we come along in two minutes and heave it in the incinerator!”
“Let me alone,” said Mildred.
“Let you alone!” He almost cried out with laughter. “Letting you alone is easy, but how can I leave myself alone? That’s what’s wrong. We need not to be let alone. We need to be upset and stirred and bothered, once in a while, anyway. Nobody bothers any more. Nobody thinks. Let a baby alone, why don’t you? What would you have in twenty years? A savage, unable to think or talk—like us!”
Mildred glanced out the window. “Now you’ve done it. Look who’s here.”
“I don’t give a damn.” He was feeling better but didn’t know why.
“It’s Mr. Leahy.”
The elation drained away. Mr. Montag slumped. “Go open the door,” he said, at last. “Tell him I’m sick.”
“Tell him yourself.”
He made sure the book was hidden behind the pillow, climbed back into bed, and had made himself tremblingly comfortable, when the door opened and Mr. Leahy strolled in, hands in pockets.
“Shut the radio off,” said Leahy, abstractedly.
This time, Mildred obeyed.
Mr. Leahy sat down in a comfortable chair with a look of strange peace in his pink face. He did not look at Montag.
“Just thought I’d come by and see how the sick man is.”
“How’d you guess?”
“Oh.” Leahy smiled his pink smile, and shrugged. “I’m an old hand at this. I’ve seen it all. You were going to call me and tell me you needed a day off.”
“Yes.”
“WELL, TAKE A DAY OFF,” said Leahy, looking at his hands. He carried an eternal match with him at times in a little case which said, Guaranteed: One Million Cigarettes Can Be Lit with this Match, and kept striking this abstractedly against its case as he talked. “Take a day off. Take two. But never take three.” He struck the match and looked at the flame and blew it out. “When will you be well?”
“Tomorrow, the next day, first of the week. I …”
“We’ve been wondering about you.” Leahy put a cigar in his mouth. “Every fireman goes through this. They only need understanding, need to know how the wheels run, what the history of our profession is. They don’t give it to rookies any more. Only fire chiefs remember it now. I’ll let you in on it.” He lit the cigar leisurely.
Mildred fidgeted.
“You ask yourself about the burning of books, why, how, when.” Leahy exuded a great gray cloud of smoke.
“Maybe,” said Montag.
“It started around about the Civil War, I’d say. Photography discovered. Fast printing presses coming up. Films at the early part of the Twentieth Century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass, Montag, mass.”
“I see.”
“And because they had mass, they became simpler. Books now. Once they appealed to various small groups of people, here and there. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of mass and elbows. Films and radios and magazines and books had to level down to a sort of paste-pudding norm. Do you follow me?”
“I think so.”
Leahy looked through a veil of smoke, not at Montag, but at the thing he was describing. “Picture it. The nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, and slow living. You might call him a slow motion man. Then in the Twentieth Century you speed up the camera.”
“A good analogy.”
“Splendid. Books get shorter. Condensations appear. Digests. Tabloids. Radio programs simplify. Everything sublimates itself to the gag, the snap ending.”
“Snap ending.” Mildred nodded approvingly. “You should have heard last night—”
“Great classics are cut to fit fifteen minute shows, then two minute book columns, then two line digest resumes. Magazines become picture books! Out of the nursery to the college, back to the nursery, in a few short centuries!”
MILDRED AROSE. 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, picking up.
“Faster and faster the film, Mr. Montag! Quick, Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now! Flick, Flash, Here, There, Swift, Up, Down, Why, How, Who, Eh? Mr. Montag, digest-digests, political affairs in one column, a sentence, a headline, and then, in mid-air, vanish! The mind of man, whirling so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, publicists, ad men, broadcasters 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. In a moment, with sublime innocence, she would be pulling the hidden book out from behind the pillow and displaying it as if it were a reptile!
Leahy blew a cumulus of cigar smoke at the ceiling. “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling neglected, finally ignored. Life is immediate. The job counts. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting bolts?”
“Let me fix your pillow,” said Mildred, being the video housewife.
“No,” whispered Montag.
“The zipper replaces the button. Does a man have time to think while dressing in the morning, a philosophical time?”
“No,” said Montag, automatically.
Mildred tugged at the pillow.
“Get away,” said Montag.
“Life becomes one big Prat Fall, Mr. Montag. No more subtleties. Everything is bang and boff and wow!”
“Wow,” reflected Mildred, yanking the pillow edge.
“For God’s sake, let me be!” said Montag, passionately.
Leahy stared.
Mildred’s hand was frozen behind the pillow. Her hand was on the book, her face stunned, her mouth opening to ask a question …
“Theaters stand empty, Mr. Montag, replaced by television and baseball and sports where nobody has to think at all, not at all, at all.” Now Leahy was almost invisible, a voice somewhere back of a choking screen of cigar smoke.
“What’s this?” asked Mildred, with delight, almost. Montag crushed and heaved back against her hands. “What’ve you hid here?”
“Sit down!” Montag screamed. She jumped back, her hands empty. “We’re talking!”
LEAHY CONTINUED, MILDLY. “Cartoons everywhere. Books become cartoons. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Time to kill. No work, all leisure. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, anywhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee, towns becoming motels, people in nomadic surges from city to city, impatient, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept last night and I the night before.”
Mildred went in the other room and slammed the door. She turned on the radio.
“Go on,” said Montag.
“Intelligent writers gave up in disgust. Magazines were vanilla tapioca. The book buyer, bored by dishwater, his brain spinning,
quit buying. Everyone but the comic-publisher died a slow publishing death. There you have it. Don’t blame the Government. Technology, mass exploitation, and censorship from frightened officials did the trick. Today, thanks to them, you can read comic books, confessions, or trade journals, nothing else. All the rest is dangerous.”
“Yes, but why the firemen?” asked Montag.
“Ah,” said Leahy, leaning forward in the clouds of smoke to finish. “With schools turning out doers instead of thinkers, with non-readers, naturally in ignorance, they hated and feared books. You always fear an unfamiliar thing. ‘Intellectual’ became a swear word. Books were snobbish things.
“The little man wants you and me to be like him. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot out of the weapon. Un-breach men’s minds. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? And so, when houses became all fireproof and there was no longer need of firemen for protection, they were given the new job, as official censors, judges, jurors, punishers. That’s you, Mr. Montag, and me.”
Leahy stood up. “I’ve got to get going.”
Montag lay back in bed. “Thanks for explaining it to me.”
“You must understand our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. People must be contented. Books bother them. Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. We burn it. White people don’t like to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it, too. Anything for serenity.”
Leahy shook Montag’s limp hand.
“Oh, one last thing. Once in his career, every fireman gets curious. What do the books say, he wonders. A good question. Well, they say nothing, Mr. Montag. Nothing you can touch or believe in. They’re about non-existent people, figments. Not to be trusted. But anyway, say, a fireman ‘takes’ a book, at a fire, almost by ‘accident.’ A natural error.”
“Natural.”
“We allow that. We let him keep it 24 hours. If he hasn’t burned it by then, we burn it for him.”
“I see,” said Montag. His throat was dry.
“You’ll be at work tonight at six o’clock?”
“No.”
“What!”