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A Timeless Classic: Fahrenheit 451 by R.Bradbury's Collection
Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of Guy Montag and his transformation from a book-burning fireman to a book-reading rebel. Montag lives in an oppressive society that attempts to eliminate all sources of complexity, contradiction, and confusion to ensure uncomplicated happiness for all its citizens.
- GenresScience Fiction
Kindle Edition
Published June 7, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 25, 2026
So 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper ignites. That explains the name. But doesn’t explain why I picked this book to read. It’s had a lot of publicity and exposure. Even my son was given it as a text to study at high school. And I’ve seen it around the house. Finally, I thought that I had better read it to know what all the fuss was about.
Well I’ve now read it and find I’m still wondering what all the fuss was about. OK it’s a dystopian novel, set some time in the future. It can’t be too much in the future because they speak of a couple of generations ago (what’s that 40-50 years?) when people were reading books. Not burning them, as is the focus of the current main character.
I can see the main idea.....that ordinary people in Nazi Germany were whipped up to burn their books....all sorts of books because the Nazi’s were starting afresh with National Socialism....and that’s all the knowledge that ordinary folks were going to need.
Well first I have a great deal of difficulty I accepting that you can wipe out knowledge (such as that in books) within the space of two generations. After all mothers (and grandmothers) will talk to kids etc., etc.. And even the guys hanging out by the railroad were carrying knowledge around in their heads. Great!....as long as they kept their heads and were alive. But also very temporary and subject to distortion over time.
I also had a lot of trouble understanding how the Fire chief, Beatty, was able to quote from Dr Johnson and an whole host of other authors etc., if he didn’t have access to books. Just seems like a bit of a logical flaw. And there is the minor issue of who put out fires in this dystopian world? Presumably they had accidental fires that burn down buildings that had not been scheduled for burning. Did they have a parallel fire service?
And I was amused at how the “future-writer” got things wrong. For example, everyone was smoking....especially the women. Well this might have looked like the future from the perspective of 1954 when the book was published. But certainly looks odd now.
OK, I acknowledge that it was a valiant attempt to warn everyone of the danger to us all , if some “fundamentalist” or idealistically-driven group gets into power and proceeds to eliminate existing knowledge and dissenting views. And we certainly have this sort of behaviour around: The Taliban, Scientologists and the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren spring to mind. And I suspect that there are not too many copies of dissident materials around in China or North Vietnam.
Was it a good story? I guess so. We had all the excitement of the hunt and some pretty dramatic material when Montag sets the flame thrower onto Beatty the fire chief. Did I enjoy it? Hmmm...not entirely. Found it a mixture of depressing and unbelievable. So, on balance, 3.5 stars from me.
I’ve included a few extracts, below, from the book to remind me of the prose and also for things that caught my attention. And maybe it might help me recall what I’ve been reading.
He saw but did not see what the Eye saw. 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. Go on, anyway, shove the bore down, slush up the emptiness, if such a thing could be brought out in the throb of the suction snake.
Montag slid down the brass pole. He went out to look at the city and the clouds had cleared away completely, and he lit a cigarette and came back to bend down and look at the Hound.
My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility, my uncle says. Do you know, I'm responsible. I was spanked when I needed it, years ago. And I do all the shopping and house-cleaning by hand.
“There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.” “She was simple-minded.”
“She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burned her.”
“You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman.” “Thought!” he said. “Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them.”
Beatty puffed his pipe. “Every fireman, sooner or later, hits this. They only need understanding, to know how the wheels run. Need to know the history of our profession. They don't feed it to rookies like they used to. Damn shame.” Puff. “Only fire chiefs remember it now.” Puff. “I'll let you in on it.”
Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”
“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”
There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it.
Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy........The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dyke.
We can't burn these. I want to look at them, at least look at them once. Then if what the Captain says is true, we'll burn them together, believe me, we'll burn them together.
“Jesus God,” said Montag. “Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it? We've started and won two atomic wars since 1960.
“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.”
“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.
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.
Now if you suggest that we print extra books and arrange to have them hidden in firemen's houses all over the country, so that seeds of suspicion would be sown among these arsonists, bravo, I'd say!” “Plant the books, turn in an alarm, and see the firemen's houses burn, is that what you mean?”
Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it's a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels any more.
The old man nodded. “Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”
Here I am sending you out into the night, while I stay behind the lines with my damned ears listening for you to get your head chopped off.”
They say you retain knowledge even when you're sleeping, if someone whispers it in your ear.”
“Here.” Far away across town in the night, the faintest whisper of a turned page. “The Book of Job.”
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.
Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women's faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enamelled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colourful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay.
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain
Mrs. Phelps was crying.
Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it? Go home, go home!” he yelled. “Before I knock you down and kick you out of the door!”
They sat and the cards were dealt. In Beatty's sight, Montag felt the guilt of his hands. His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never rested, always stirred and picked and hid in pockets, moving from under Beatty's alcohol-flame stare.
Twice in half an hour, Montag had to rise from the game and go to the latrine to wash his hands. When he came back he hid his hands under the table.
“Well,” said Beatty, “the crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We're all sheep who have strayed at times.
“I'll tell you,” said Beatty, smiling at his cards. “That made you for a little while a drunkard.
And you, quoting Dr. Johnson, said 'Knowledge is more than equivalent to force!' And I said, 'Well, Dr. Johnson also said, dear boy, that ”He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.'“ Stick with the fireman, Montag. All else is dreary chaos!”
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!”
“Oh, you were scared silly,” said Beatty, “for I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be!
Silence. Montag sat like a carved white stone.
Faber began, softly, “All right, he's had his say. You must take it in. I'll say my say, too, in the next few hours........But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.
“Something the matter, Montag?” “Why,” said Montag slowly, “we've stopped in front of my house.”
“Well,” said Beatty, “now you did it. Old Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's burnt his damn wings, he wonders why.
“The books, Montag!” The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.
“When you're quite finished,” said Beatty behind him. “You're under arrest.”
The house fell in red coals and black ash......“Was it my wife turned in the alarm?” Beatty nodded. “But her friends turned in an alarm earlier, that I let ride. One way or the other, you'd have got it. It was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy like that.
“Hand it over, Guy,” said Beatty with a fixed smile. And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering mannikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him.
Now, sucking all the night into his open mouth, and blowing it out pale, with all the blackness left heavily inside himself,
Three blocks away a few headlights glared. Montag drew a deep breath. His lungs were like burning brooms in his chest. His mouth was sucked dry from running. His throat tasted of bloody iron and there was rusted steel in his feet.
I feel alive for the first time in years,” said Faber. “I feel I'm doing what I should have done a lifetime ago. For a little while I'm not afraid.......They say there's lots of old Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los Angeles. Most of them are wanted and hunted in the cities. They survive, I guess.
With an effort, Montag reminded himself again that this was no fictional episode to be watched on his run to the river; it was in actuality his own chess-game he was witnessing, move by move.
Behind him now twenty million silently baying Hounds ricocheted across parlours, three-cushion shooting from right wall to centre wall to left wall, gone, right wall, centre wall, left wall, gone! Montag jammed his Seashell to his ear.
Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silver-fish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.
Millie was not here and the Hound was not here, but the dry smell of hay blowing from some distant field put Montag on the land.
The land rushed at him, a tidal wave. He was crushed by darkness and the look of the country and the million odours on a wind that iced his body. He fell back under the breaking curve of darkness and sound and smell, his ears roaring. He whirled. The stars poured over his sight like flaming meteors.
“All right, you can come out now!” Montag stepped back into the shadows. “It's all right,” the voice said. “You're welcome here.” Montag walked slowly toward the fire and the five old men sitting there dressed in dark blue denim pants and jackets and dark blue suits. He did not know what to say to them. “Sit down,” said the man who seemed to be the leader of the small group. “Have some coffee?”
“We're book-burners, too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they'd be found. Micro-filming didn't pay off; we were always travelling, we didn't want to bury the film and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it's here. And the hour is late. And the war's begun............We're stopped and searched occasionally, but there's nothing on our persons to incriminate us..........We mustn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust-jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.
And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did.
What did you give to the city, Montag? Ashes. What did the others give to each other? Nothingness........“Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said earlier, he was a sculptor.
And the war began and ended in that instant......Later, the men around Montag could not say if they had really seen anything. Perhaps the merest flourish of light and motion in the sky.
The bombardment was to all intents and purposes finished, once the jets had sighted their target, alerted their bombardiers at five thousand miles an hour; as quick as the whisper of a scythe the war was finished.
The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south.
Montag watched the great dust settle and the great silence move down upon their world. And lying there it seemed that he saw every single grain of dust and every blade of grass and that he heard every cry and shout and whisper going up in the world now. Silence fell down in the sifting dust, and all the leisure they might need to look around, to gather the reality of this day into their senses.
Silently, Granger arose,......“It's flat,” he said, a long time later. “City looks like a heap of baking-powder. It's gone.” And a long time after that. “I wonder how many knew it was coming? I wonder how many were surprised?”
“Now, let's get on upstream,” said Granger. “And hold on to one thought: You're not important. You're not anything.
Well I’ve now read it and find I’m still wondering what all the fuss was about. OK it’s a dystopian novel, set some time in the future. It can’t be too much in the future because they speak of a couple of generations ago (what’s that 40-50 years?) when people were reading books. Not burning them, as is the focus of the current main character.
I can see the main idea.....that ordinary people in Nazi Germany were whipped up to burn their books....all sorts of books because the Nazi’s were starting afresh with National Socialism....and that’s all the knowledge that ordinary folks were going to need.
Well first I have a great deal of difficulty I accepting that you can wipe out knowledge (such as that in books) within the space of two generations. After all mothers (and grandmothers) will talk to kids etc., etc.. And even the guys hanging out by the railroad were carrying knowledge around in their heads. Great!....as long as they kept their heads and were alive. But also very temporary and subject to distortion over time.
I also had a lot of trouble understanding how the Fire chief, Beatty, was able to quote from Dr Johnson and an whole host of other authors etc., if he didn’t have access to books. Just seems like a bit of a logical flaw. And there is the minor issue of who put out fires in this dystopian world? Presumably they had accidental fires that burn down buildings that had not been scheduled for burning. Did they have a parallel fire service?
And I was amused at how the “future-writer” got things wrong. For example, everyone was smoking....especially the women. Well this might have looked like the future from the perspective of 1954 when the book was published. But certainly looks odd now.
OK, I acknowledge that it was a valiant attempt to warn everyone of the danger to us all , if some “fundamentalist” or idealistically-driven group gets into power and proceeds to eliminate existing knowledge and dissenting views. And we certainly have this sort of behaviour around: The Taliban, Scientologists and the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren spring to mind. And I suspect that there are not too many copies of dissident materials around in China or North Vietnam.
Was it a good story? I guess so. We had all the excitement of the hunt and some pretty dramatic material when Montag sets the flame thrower onto Beatty the fire chief. Did I enjoy it? Hmmm...not entirely. Found it a mixture of depressing and unbelievable. So, on balance, 3.5 stars from me.
I’ve included a few extracts, below, from the book to remind me of the prose and also for things that caught my attention. And maybe it might help me recall what I’ve been reading.
He saw but did not see what the Eye saw. 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. Go on, anyway, shove the bore down, slush up the emptiness, if such a thing could be brought out in the throb of the suction snake.
Montag slid down the brass pole. He went out to look at the city and the clouds had cleared away completely, and he lit a cigarette and came back to bend down and look at the Hound.
My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility, my uncle says. Do you know, I'm responsible. I was spanked when I needed it, years ago. And I do all the shopping and house-cleaning by hand.
“There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.” “She was simple-minded.”
“She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burned her.”
“You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman.” “Thought!” he said. “Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them.”
Beatty puffed his pipe. “Every fireman, sooner or later, hits this. They only need understanding, to know how the wheels run. Need to know the history of our profession. They don't feed it to rookies like they used to. Damn shame.” Puff. “Only fire chiefs remember it now.” Puff. “I'll let you in on it.”
Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”
“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”
There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it.
Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy........The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dyke.
We can't burn these. I want to look at them, at least look at them once. Then if what the Captain says is true, we'll burn them together, believe me, we'll burn them together.
“Jesus God,” said Montag. “Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it? We've started and won two atomic wars since 1960.
“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.”
“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.
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.
Now if you suggest that we print extra books and arrange to have them hidden in firemen's houses all over the country, so that seeds of suspicion would be sown among these arsonists, bravo, I'd say!” “Plant the books, turn in an alarm, and see the firemen's houses burn, is that what you mean?”
Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it's a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels any more.
The old man nodded. “Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”
Here I am sending you out into the night, while I stay behind the lines with my damned ears listening for you to get your head chopped off.”
They say you retain knowledge even when you're sleeping, if someone whispers it in your ear.”
“Here.” Far away across town in the night, the faintest whisper of a turned page. “The Book of Job.”
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.
Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women's faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enamelled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colourful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay.
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain
Mrs. Phelps was crying.
Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it? Go home, go home!” he yelled. “Before I knock you down and kick you out of the door!”
They sat and the cards were dealt. In Beatty's sight, Montag felt the guilt of his hands. His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never rested, always stirred and picked and hid in pockets, moving from under Beatty's alcohol-flame stare.
Twice in half an hour, Montag had to rise from the game and go to the latrine to wash his hands. When he came back he hid his hands under the table.
“Well,” said Beatty, “the crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We're all sheep who have strayed at times.
“I'll tell you,” said Beatty, smiling at his cards. “That made you for a little while a drunkard.
And you, quoting Dr. Johnson, said 'Knowledge is more than equivalent to force!' And I said, 'Well, Dr. Johnson also said, dear boy, that ”He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.'“ Stick with the fireman, Montag. All else is dreary chaos!”
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!”
“Oh, you were scared silly,” said Beatty, “for I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be!
Silence. Montag sat like a carved white stone.
Faber began, softly, “All right, he's had his say. You must take it in. I'll say my say, too, in the next few hours........But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority.
“Something the matter, Montag?” “Why,” said Montag slowly, “we've stopped in front of my house.”
“Well,” said Beatty, “now you did it. Old Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's burnt his damn wings, he wonders why.
“The books, Montag!” The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.
“When you're quite finished,” said Beatty behind him. “You're under arrest.”
The house fell in red coals and black ash......“Was it my wife turned in the alarm?” Beatty nodded. “But her friends turned in an alarm earlier, that I let ride. One way or the other, you'd have got it. It was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy like that.
“Hand it over, Guy,” said Beatty with a fixed smile. And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering mannikin, no longer human or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on him.
Now, sucking all the night into his open mouth, and blowing it out pale, with all the blackness left heavily inside himself,
Three blocks away a few headlights glared. Montag drew a deep breath. His lungs were like burning brooms in his chest. His mouth was sucked dry from running. His throat tasted of bloody iron and there was rusted steel in his feet.
I feel alive for the first time in years,” said Faber. “I feel I'm doing what I should have done a lifetime ago. For a little while I'm not afraid.......They say there's lots of old Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los Angeles. Most of them are wanted and hunted in the cities. They survive, I guess.
With an effort, Montag reminded himself again that this was no fictional episode to be watched on his run to the river; it was in actuality his own chess-game he was witnessing, move by move.
Behind him now twenty million silently baying Hounds ricocheted across parlours, three-cushion shooting from right wall to centre wall to left wall, gone, right wall, centre wall, left wall, gone! Montag jammed his Seashell to his ear.
Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silver-fish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.
Millie was not here and the Hound was not here, but the dry smell of hay blowing from some distant field put Montag on the land.
The land rushed at him, a tidal wave. He was crushed by darkness and the look of the country and the million odours on a wind that iced his body. He fell back under the breaking curve of darkness and sound and smell, his ears roaring. He whirled. The stars poured over his sight like flaming meteors.
“All right, you can come out now!” Montag stepped back into the shadows. “It's all right,” the voice said. “You're welcome here.” Montag walked slowly toward the fire and the five old men sitting there dressed in dark blue denim pants and jackets and dark blue suits. He did not know what to say to them. “Sit down,” said the man who seemed to be the leader of the small group. “Have some coffee?”
“We're book-burners, too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they'd be found. Micro-filming didn't pay off; we were always travelling, we didn't want to bury the film and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it's here. And the hour is late. And the war's begun............We're stopped and searched occasionally, but there's nothing on our persons to incriminate us..........We mustn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust-jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.
And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did.
What did you give to the city, Montag? Ashes. What did the others give to each other? Nothingness........“Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said earlier, he was a sculptor.
And the war began and ended in that instant......Later, the men around Montag could not say if they had really seen anything. Perhaps the merest flourish of light and motion in the sky.
The bombardment was to all intents and purposes finished, once the jets had sighted their target, alerted their bombardiers at five thousand miles an hour; as quick as the whisper of a scythe the war was finished.
The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south.
Montag watched the great dust settle and the great silence move down upon their world. And lying there it seemed that he saw every single grain of dust and every blade of grass and that he heard every cry and shout and whisper going up in the world now. Silence fell down in the sifting dust, and all the leisure they might need to look around, to gather the reality of this day into their senses.
Silently, Granger arose,......“It's flat,” he said, a long time later. “City looks like a heap of baking-powder. It's gone.” And a long time after that. “I wonder how many knew it was coming? I wonder how many were surprised?”
“Now, let's get on upstream,” said Granger. “And hold on to one thought: You're not important. You're not anything.
August 13, 2025
I did not read the Kindle Edition, but this was the closest I could find to the paperback, 60th Anniversary Edition that I actually read. The first copyright was in 1951 & renewed a number of times. I know I didn't read it in '51, given that I was still learning to talk then, but I did read SO long ago that it was almost like reading a new (to me) book.
Where to start? You know the general outline: Montag was a fireman, i.e. a book burner, by occupation. (Houses were now fireproof, so the old job of firemen was obsolete.) And he enjoyed it, watching flames consume books, the pages flying about, and the houses in which these books had been found. (Yes, this is a bit of a contradiction to the fireproof houses, but, hey.) Then he meets a young woman, a neighbor, who enjoys walking outdoors, observing the world around her, thinking about things. This is bizarre behavior in a society where people are surrounded (literally) by screens, filled with video stories whenever turned on. Montag's wife is glued to these, refers to the characters as her family. Yes, this is a pathetic society, prescient, but how far fetched, really, when so many of us are glued to our handheld screens for hours on end? In any event he begins to be uncomfortable in ways he can't quite grasp.
He has a secret hidden in an air vent in his home that sometimes makes him uneasy. And he becomes unable to square his thinking with his job. He does not go on the offensive immediately or directly, but does put himself in a position to draw attention, to be seen as not necessarily trustworthy.
He meets a kindred spirit, by chance. He takes some chances. Drama ensues and I am not going to tell you about that or about how it ends. If you don't remember from your earlier reading, just grab the book! Let me just say that, as in some of the best dystopian fiction, there are glimmers of hope.
For context, Bradbury is opposed to all forms of totalitarianism and is one of those people of the opinion that the far right and far left are the same. It seems he began this work during Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union and first published it during McCarthyism in the U.S.
Obviously, we are not burning books right now, though some have suggested it. But elements of this nation certainly are banning them, mostly in schools, but also in some libraries. Yes, books are becoming seen as dangerous, things that at least some should be protected from. This book clearly is relevant, possibly necessary, today.
Where to start? You know the general outline: Montag was a fireman, i.e. a book burner, by occupation. (Houses were now fireproof, so the old job of firemen was obsolete.) And he enjoyed it, watching flames consume books, the pages flying about, and the houses in which these books had been found. (Yes, this is a bit of a contradiction to the fireproof houses, but, hey.) Then he meets a young woman, a neighbor, who enjoys walking outdoors, observing the world around her, thinking about things. This is bizarre behavior in a society where people are surrounded (literally) by screens, filled with video stories whenever turned on. Montag's wife is glued to these, refers to the characters as her family. Yes, this is a pathetic society, prescient, but how far fetched, really, when so many of us are glued to our handheld screens for hours on end? In any event he begins to be uncomfortable in ways he can't quite grasp.
He has a secret hidden in an air vent in his home that sometimes makes him uneasy. And he becomes unable to square his thinking with his job. He does not go on the offensive immediately or directly, but does put himself in a position to draw attention, to be seen as not necessarily trustworthy.
He meets a kindred spirit, by chance. He takes some chances. Drama ensues and I am not going to tell you about that or about how it ends. If you don't remember from your earlier reading, just grab the book! Let me just say that, as in some of the best dystopian fiction, there are glimmers of hope.
For context, Bradbury is opposed to all forms of totalitarianism and is one of those people of the opinion that the far right and far left are the same. It seems he began this work during Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union and first published it during McCarthyism in the U.S.
Obviously, we are not burning books right now, though some have suggested it. But elements of this nation certainly are banning them, mostly in schools, but also in some libraries. Yes, books are becoming seen as dangerous, things that at least some should be protected from. This book clearly is relevant, possibly necessary, today.
March 27, 2026
The most important book that I read. After reading for the first time, way back when, I fell in love with the genre. Science Fiction stories are timeless, cautionary tales that remain relevant beyond the author's time on this earth. My passion to write my own books started here within these pages. If you haven't read this classic, do yourself a favor, unplug from technology and take in this book through reading. Actual reading. No audio book reader or recorded narration. See and read with your eyes only. No screens needed. Feel the paper pages in your hand. And if the Firemen come, what will do; conform or rebel against tyranny.
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