"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, Part 2: The Sieve and the Sand

The parlour was dead and Mildred kept peering in at it with a blank expression as Montag paced the floor and came back and squatted down and read a page as many as ten times, aloud.

Montag did not look back at his wife as he went trembling along the hall to the kitchen, where he stood a long time watching the rain hit the windows before he came back down the hall in the grey light, waiting for the tremble to subside.

The old man admitted to being a retired English professor who had been thrown out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage.

Once as a child he had sat upon a yellow dune by the sea in the middle of the blue and hot summer day, trying to fill a sieve with sand, because some cruel cousin had said, “Fill this sieve and you'll get a dime!”

It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag found himself on his feet, the shocked inhabitants of the loud car staring, moving back from this man with the insane, gorged face, the gibbering, dry mouth, the flapping book in his fist.

The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass.

Behind him, the door to a bedroom stood open, and in that room a litter of machinery and steel tools was strewn upon a desk-top.

Montag had only a glimpse, before Faber, seeing Montag's attention diverted, turned quickly and shut the bedroom door and stood holding the knob with a trembling hand.

“It's an insidious plan, if I do say so myself.”

“To see the firehouses burn across the land, destroyed as hotbeds of treason.

The salamander devours his tail!

“Aren't there professors like yourself, former writers, historians, linguists...?”

The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

My cowardice is of such a passion, complementing the revolutionary spirit that lives in its shadow, I was forced to design this.”

Playing the stock-market, of course, the last refuge in the world for the dangerous intellectual out of a job.

A minute later, Three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other's limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter.

Some were missing and he knew that she had started on her own slow process of dispersing the dynamite in her house, stick by stick.

His mind would well over at last and he would not be Montag any more, this the old man told him, assured him, promised him.

It was good listening to the beetle hum, the sleepy mosquito buzz and delicate filigree murmur of the old man's voice at first scolding him and then consoling him in the late hour of night as he emerged from the steaming subway toward the firehouse world.

I must admit that your blind raging invigorated me.

If you need help when Beatty pries at you, I'll be sitting right here in your eardrum making notes!”

For these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with Job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands seemed gloved with blood.

And ‘The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’

And you shrieked, ‘Knowledge is power!’ and ‘A dwarf on a giant's shoulders of the furthest of the two!’ and I summed my side up with rare serenity in, ‘The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us, Mr. Valery once said.’”

“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!

And you got in and we drove back to the firehouse in beatific silence, all dwindled away to peace.”

Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.

They leaped into the air and clutched the brass pole as if it were the last vantage point above a tidal wave passing below, and then the brass pole, to their dismay slid them down into darkness, into the blast and cough and suction of the gaseous dragon roaring to life!

One anger displacing another.

The Salamander boomed to a halt, throwing men off in slips and clumsy hops.