Fahrenheit 451, pgs. 1-16 - audio

Fahrenheit 451 chapter 1 the hearth and the salamander it was a pleasure to burn it was a special pleasure to see things eaten to see things blackened and changed with the Brass novel and his fist with this great Python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world the blood-dimmed up laying all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history with his symbolic helmet number two four and five one on his solid head his eyes are orange flame with the thought of what came next he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gordon fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black he strolled in a swarm of fireflies he wanted above all like the old joke to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace while the flappin pigeon wing books died on the porch and lawn of the house while the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on the wind turned dark with Bernie Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame he knew that when he returned to the firehouse he might wink at himself a minstrel man burnt quarts in the mirror later going to sleep he would feel the fiery smile ripped by his face muscles in the dark it never went away that smile it never went away as long as he remembered he hung up his black beetle colored helmet and shined it he hung his flameproof jacket neatly he showered luxuriously and then whistling hands in pockets walked across the upper floor of the fire station and fell down the hole at the last moment when disaster seemed positive he pulled his hands from his pockets and broke his fall by grasping the golden pole he slid to a squeaking halt the hills one inch from the concrete floor downstairs he walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the subway where the silent air propelled train slid soundlessly down it's lubricated flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air onto the cream tiled escalator rising to the suburb whistling he let the escalator waft him into the still night air he walked toward the corner thinking little at all about nothing in particular before he reached the corner however he slowed as if a wind had sprung up from nowhere as if someone had called his name the last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here moving in the Starlight toward his house he had felt that a moment prior to his making the turn someone had been there the air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there quietly and only a moment before he came simply turned to a shadow and let him through perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands on his face felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person standing might raise the immediate atmosphere 10 degrees for an instant there was no understanding it each time he made the turn he saw only the white unused bugling sidewalk with perhaps on one night something vanishing swiftly across the lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak but now tonight he slowed almost to a stop his inner mind reaching out to turn the corner for him had heard the faintest whisper breathing what was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there waiting he turned the corner the autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seemed fixed to a sliding walk letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward her head was half bent to watch her Shuster the circling leaves her face was slender and milk white and it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity it was a look almost of pale surprise the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them her dress was white and it whispered he almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked and the infinitely small sound now the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting the trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain the girl stopped and looked as if she might pull back in surprise but instead stood regarding Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive that he felt he had said something quite wonderful but he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the Phoenix disc on his chest he spoke again of course he said you're our new neighbour aren't you and you must be she raised her eyes from his professional symbols the fireman her voice trailed off how oddly say that I I'd have I'd have known it with my eyes shut she said slowly what the the smell of kerosene my wife always complains he left you never wash it off completely no you don't she said in awe he felt she was walking in a circle about him turning him in for in shaking him quietly and emptying his pockets without once moving herself kerosene he said because the silence had lengthen is nothing but perfume to me does it seem like that really of course why not she gave herself time to think of it I don't know she turned to face the sidewalk going toward their homes do you mind if I walk back with you I'm Claire Rhys McClelland Clary's Guy Montag come along what are you doing out so late wandering around how old are you they walked in the warm cool blowing knife on the silvered pavement and there was the faintest breath of fresh apricots and strawberries in the air he looked around and realized this was quite impossible so late in the year there was only the girl walking with him now her face brightest snow in the moonlight and he knew she was working his questions around seeking the best answer she could possibly give well she said I'm 17 and I'm crazy my uncle says the two always go together when people ask your age he said always say 17 an insane isn't this a nice time of night to walk I like to smell things and look at things and sometimes stay up all night walking and watch the Sun Rise they walked on again in silence and finally she said thoughtfully you know I'm not afraid of you at all he was surprised why should you be so many people are afraid of firemen I mean but you're just a man after all he saw himself in her eyes suspending in two shining drops of bright water himself dark and tiny and fine detail the lines about his mouth everything there as if her eyes were too miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him in tact her face turned to him now was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it it was not that hysterical light of electricity but what but the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle one time as a child in a power failure his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them and they mother and son alone transformed hoping that the power might not come on again too soon and then Clarice McLellan said do you mind if I ask how long you've worked at being a fireman since I was twenty ten years ago do you ever read any other book you burn that's against the law oh of course it's fine work Monday burned Millay Wednesday Whitman Friday Faulkner burn him to ashes didn't burn the ashes that's our official slogan they walked still further and the girl said is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them no houses have always been fireproof take my word for it strange I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames she laughed she glanced quickly quickly over why are you laughing I don't know he started to laugh again and stopped why you laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off you never stop to think about what I've asked you he stopped walking you're an odd one he said looking at her haven't you any respect I don't mean to be insulting it's it's just I love to watch people too much I guess well doesn't this mean anything to you he tapped the numerals four or five one stitched on his char colored sleeve yes she whispered she increased her pace have you ever watched two jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way you're changing the subject I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is or flowers because they never see them slowly she said if you showed a driver a green blur oh yes he'd say that's grass a pink blur that's a rose garden white blurs our houses Brown blurs our cows my uncle drove slowly on the highway once he drove 40 miles an hour and they jailed him for two days isn't that funny and sad too do you think too many things said Montag uneasily I really watched parlor walls or go to the races or fun parks so I have lots of time for crazy thoughts I guess have you seen the two hundred footlong billboards in the country beyond town did you know that once billboards were only 20 feet long but cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last I didn't know that Montag laughed abruptly but I know something else you don't there's dew on the grass in the morning he suddenly couldn't remember if he hadn't known this or not and it made him quite irritable and if you look she nodded at the sky there's a man in the moon Kenan looked for a long time they walked the rest of the way in silence Hurst thoughtful his kind of clinching and uncomfortable silence in which he shot her accusing glances when they reached her house all its lights were blazing what's going on Montag had rarely seen that many house lights oh just my mother and father and uncle sitting around talking it's like being a pedestrian the only rarer my uncle was arrested another time did I tell you for being a pedestrian though we're most peculiar but what do you talk about she left at this good night she started up her walk then she seemed to remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity are you happy she said am i what he cried but she was gone running in the moonlight her front door shut gently happy of all the nonsense he stopped laughing he put his hand into the glove hole of his front door and let it know his touch the front door slid open of course I'm happy what does she think I'm not he asked a quiet room he stood looking up at the ventilator Grill in the hall and suddenly remembered that something lay hidden behind the grill something that seemed to peer down at him now he moved his eyes quickly away what a strange meeting on a strange night he remembered nothing like it saved one afternoon a year ago when he hadn't met an old man in the park and they had talked Montag shook his head he looked at the blank wall the girl's face was there really quite beautiful in memory astonishing in fact she had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you wakened to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second with a white silence and a glowing certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses but moving also toward a new Sun what as Montague of that other shelf the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times quite independent of will have it in conscience he glanced back at the wall how like a mirror to her face impossible for how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you people were more often he searched for a simile found one in his work torches blazing away until they whipped out how rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression your own innermost trembling thought what incredible power of identification the girl had she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show anticipating each flicker of an eyelid each gesture of his hand each flick of a finger that the moment before it began how long they had walked together three minutes five yet how large the time seemed now how immense a figured she was on the stage before him what a shadow she threw on the wall with her slender body he felt that if his eye it she might blink and if the muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly she would john long before he would why he thought now that i think of it she almost seemed to be waiting for me there in the streets so damn late at night he opened up a bedroom door it was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon is set complete darkness not a hint of the silver world outside the windows tightly shut the chamber a tomb world where no sound from the great city could penetrate the room was not empty he listened the little most skilled delicate dancing hum in the air the electrical murmur of a hidden wasp dug in its special pink warm nest the music was almost loud enough so he could follow the tune he felt his smile slide away melt fold over and down on itself like a tallow skinned like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing in and now blown out darkness he was not happy he was not happy he said the words to himself he recognized this as the true state of affairs he wore his happiness like a mask the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look his wife's dressed on the bed I'm covered in cold like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of still movable and in her ears the little seashells the thimble radio stamped tight and an electronic ocean of sound of music and talk and music and talk coming in coming in on the shore for unsleeping mine the room was indeed empty every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound floating her wide eye toward morning there had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swarmed that sea and not gladly gone down in it for the third time the room was cold but nonetheless he felt he could not breathe he did not wish to open the drapes and open the French windows for he did not want the moon to come into the room so with the feeling of a man who will die in the next hour for lack of air he felt his way toward his open separate and therefore cold bed an instant before his foot hit the object on the floor he knew he would hit such an object it was not unlike the feeling he had experienced before turning the corner and almost knocking the girl down his foot sending vibrations ahead received back echoes of the small barrier across its path even as the foot swung his foot kicked the object gave a dull clink and slid off in darkness he stood very straight and listened to the person on the dark bed in the completely featureless night the breath coming out of the nostrils was so faint it stirred only the furthest fringes of life a small leaf a black feather a single fibre of hair he still did not want outside light he pulled out his igniter felt the salamander etched on its silver disc gave it a flick to moonstones looked up at him in the light of his small handheld fire too pale Muenster stones buried in a creek of clear water over which the life of the world ran not touching them Mildred her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall but he felt no rain over which clouds might pass their moving shadows but she felt no shadow there was only the singing of the thimble wasp in her temps shut ears in her eyes all glass and breath going in and out softly faintly in and out her nostrils and her not caring whether he came or went went or came the object he had sent tumbling with his foot now glinted under the edge of his own bed the small crystal bottle of sleeping tablets which earlier today had been filled with 30 capsules and which now lay uncapped and empty in the light of the tiny flare as he stood there the sky over the house screamed there was a tremendous ripping sound as if two giant hands had torn ten thousand miles of black linen down the scene Montag was cut in half he felt his chest chopped down and split apart the jet bomber is going over going over going over one two one two one two six of them nine of them twelve of them one in one and one and another and another and another did all the screaming for him he opened his own mouth and let their shriek come down and out between his bared teeth the house shook the flare went out in his hand the moon stones vanished he felt his hand plunged toward the telephone the Jets were gone he felt his lips move brushing the mouthpiece of the phone emergency hospital a terrible whisper he felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black Jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow that was his idiot thought as he should shiver in the dark and let his lips go on moving and moving they had this machine they had two machines really one of them slid down into your stomach like a black Cobra down and echoing well looking for all the old water in the old time gathered there it drank up the green matter that flowed to the top and a slow boil did it drink the darkness did it suck out all the poisons accumulated with the years it fed into silence with an occasional sound of inner suffocation and blind searching it hadn't I the impersonal operator of the machine could by wearing a special optical helmet gazed into the soul of a person whom he was pumping out what did the I see he did not say he saw but did not see what the I 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 board down slush up the emptiness if such a thing could be brought out then the throb of the suction snake the operator stood smoking a cigarette the other machine was working to the other machine operated by an equally impersonal fellow in non-sustainable reddish brown coveralls this machine pumped all of the blood from the body and replaced it with fresh blood and serum got to clean him out both ways said the operator standing over the silent woman nor your's give me the stomach if you don't clean be blood leave that stuff in the blood and the blood hits the brain like a mallet bang a couple of thousand times in the brain just gives up geez quit stop it send Montag I was just saying said the operator are you done said Montag they shut the machines up tight we're done his anger did not even touch them they stood with the cigarette smoke curling around their noses and into their eyes without making them blinkers quit that's 50 bucks first why don't you tell me if she'll be all right sure she'll be okay we got all the mean stuff right in our suitcase here he can't get at her now as I said you take out the old and put in the new in here okay neither of you as an MD why didn't they send an MD from from emergency hell the operator sig removed on his lips we did these cases 9 or 10 at night got so many starting a few years ago we had special machines built with the optical lands of course that was new the rest is ancient you don't need an MD case like this all you need is to handyman clean up the problem in half an hour look he started for the door we gotta go just had another call in the old ear thimble 10 blocks from here someone else jumped off the cap of a pillbox call us if you need us again keep her quiet we got a counter sedative in her she'll wake up hungry so long in the men with the cigarettes in their straight line mouth the men with the eyes of puff adders took up their load of a machine into their case of liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff and strolled out the door Montag sank down into a chair and looked at this woman her eyes were closed now gently and he put his hand to feel the warmness of breath on his palm Mildred he said there are too many of us he thought there are billions of us and that's too many nobody knows anyone strangers come in violent you strangers come and cut your heart out strangers come and take your blood good God who were those men I never saw them before in my life half an hour past the bloodstream and this woman was new and it seemed to have done a new thing to her her cheeks were very pink and her lips were very fresh and full of color and they looked soft and relaxed someone else's blood there if only someone else's flesh and brain and memory if only they could have taken her mind along to the drycleaners and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it and brought it back in the morning if only he got up and put back the drapes and opened the windows wide to let the night air in it was two o'clock in the morning was it only an hour ago Clarisse McLellan in the street and him coming in and the darkroom and his foot kicking the little crystal bottle only an hour but the word had melted down and sprung up in a new colorless form laughter blow across the moon colored lawn from the house of Clarisse and her father and mother and the uncle who smiled so quietly and so earnestly above all their laughter was relaxed and Hardy and not forced in any way coming from the house that was so brightly lit this late at night while although all the other houses were kept to themselves in darkness Montague heard the voices talking talking talking giving talking weaving reweaving their hypnotic web Montague moved out through the French windows and crossed the lawn without even thinking of it he stood outside the talking house in the shadows thinking he might even tap on their door and we / let me come in I won't say anything I just want to listen what is it you're saying but instead he stood there very cold has faced a mask of ice listening to a man's voice the uncle moving along at an easy pace well after all this is the age of the disposable tissue blow your nose on a person wild them flush them away reach for another blow watt flush everyone using they're using everyone else's coattails how are you supposed to root for the home team when you don't even have a programmer know the names for that matter what color jerseys are they wearing as they tried out on the field Montag moved back to his own house left the window wide checked Mildred tuck the covers about her carefully and then lay down with the moonlight on his cheekbones and on the frowning ridges in his brow with the moonlight distilled in each eye to form a silver cataract there one drop of rain clarice another drop Mildred a third vehicle a fourth the fire tonight one Clarice - Mildred three the uncle for fire one Mildred - Clarice one two three four five Clarice Mildred uncle fire sleeping tablets men disposable tissue coattails blow wad flush Clarice Mildred uncle fire tablets tissues blow watt flush one two three one two three rain - storm the uncle laughing Thunder falling downstairs the whole world pouring down the fire gushing up in a volcano all rushing on down around in a spouting roar and rivering streamed toward morning I don't know anything anymore he said and let us sleep laws and dissolve on his tongue at 9:00 in the morning Mildred bed was empty Montague got up quickly his heart pumping and ran down the hall and stopped at the kitchen door toast popped out of the silver toaster was seized by a spidery metal hand that drenched it with melted butter Mildred watched the toast delivered to her plate she had both ears plugged with electronic bees that were humming the hour away she looked up suddenly saw him and nodded you all right he asked she was an expert at lip-reading from ten years of apprenticeship at seashell ear thimbles she nodded again she set the toaster clicking away at another piece of bread Montag sat down his wife said I don't know why I should be so hungry you I'm hungry last night he began it didn't sleep well feel terrible she said I god I'm hungry I can't figure it last night he said again she watched his lips casually what about last night don't you remember what did we have while party or something feel like I'm have a hangover god I'm hungry who was here a few people he said that's what I thought she chewed her toast sore stomach but I'm I'm hungry as all get-out hope I didn't do anything foolish at the party no he said quietly the tow spidered out a piece of buttered bread for him he held it in his hand feeling obligated you don't look so hot yourself said his wife

Channel: Mr. JaiSun Bolden

Views: 14,177

Rating: 4.6959066 out of 5

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Id: ZB41nz2CBEM

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2017