Fahrenheit 451: Part 1

With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black.

And if the muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he would.

The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one's yard. The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached.

At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse areaway, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first.

Were all firemen picked then for their looks as well as their proclivities?

Beatty, Stoneman, and Black ran up the sidewalk, suddenly odious and fat in the plump fireproof slickers.

Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book alighted, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering.

On the front porch where she had come to weigh them quietly with her eyes, her quietness a condemnation, the woman stood motionless.

She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

“A man named Latimer said that to a man named Nicholas Ridley, as they were being burnt alive at Oxford, for heresy, on October 16, 1555.”

You drowned in music and pure cacophony.

It was like a faint drift of greenish luminescent smoke, the motion of a single huge October leaf blowing across the lawn and away.

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!

Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything.

If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration.