I recently received a communication from Mr. Melvin Schuetz, former assistant to the curators of Baylor University’s Armstrong Browning Library and Museum, regarding Chesley Bonestell’s cover illustration for the December, 1950 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fictionwhich – followed by my response – appears as a “Comment” to this post.
Mr. Schuetz has long had a deep interest in Chesley Bonestell’s body of work. As described atBaylor Blogs, “Melvin is also passionate about the space program and the work of space artist Chesley Bonestell. He authored A Chesley Bonestell Space Art Chronology, published in 1999; collaborated on an illustrated book The Art of Chesley Bonestell in 2001 for which he received a Hugo Award; and co-produced a multi-award winning documentary on Bonestell, Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future, in 2018.”
Here’s more about Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future:
P r o m o…
Following closely in the pixels of my prior post about William Timmins’ cover illustration of the January, 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, here’s another reimagined magazine cover: Chesley Bonestell’s cover art for the December, 1950 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Unlike, Timmins’ painting, Bonestell’s depiction of a spacecraft gracefully sweeping just above clouds of a moon of Saturn doesn’t pertain to any of the ten stories within the magazine. Similarly, the only information “about” the painting is the simple statement “Cover Illustration Chesley Bonestell”; the issue is absent of anything dealing with the imagined when, where, why, and how of the scene depicted.
Regardless, the illustration is wonderful; certainly for me, one of the best – if not the very best – covers that appeared during the magazine’s (thus far 74 year long) ongoing history, and I think very highly among the ranks of all science fiction pulps from the mid-twentieth century. The combination of glowing clouds in shades of gray, Saturn as a crescent with its rings a mere sliver of light, and, pale brown cliffs in the distance set against a thinly starlit deeply blue sky, combine to make a wondrous scene.
The painting imparts feelings of wonder, danger, and beauty. What is the spaceship’s origin? On what mission is it headed … to simply conduct a reconnaissance of the moon – Titan? – and then depart, to land on the moon’s surface, or, to sweep by, passing en-route to another – unknown – destination? Are any explorers aboard the craft, or is it entirely automated? What is the time-frame of the action – only a few decades hence, or in a future far, far distant, when not robots but men have finally leapt into the depths of the solar system, and beyond? The answers lie in our imagination.
Sweeping through the void.
Here’s the original cover which is the basis of the above image. Lovely work by Chesley Bonestell.
This has long been so in the realm of science fiction, a striking example of which – perhaps arising from equal measures and intuition and imagination – appearing in Astounding Science Fiction in mid-1949. That year, Eric Frank Russell’s three-part serial “Dreadful Sanctuary” was serialized in the June, July, and August issues of the magazine.
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June, 1948: Cover by William F. Timmins.
(Note Timmins’ name on the “puzzle piece” in the lower left corner!)
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July, 1948: Cover by Chesley Bonestell
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August, 1948: Cover by: Alexander Cañedo
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With interior illustrations by Timmins, the story, set in 1972, is centered upon the efforts of one John J. Armstrong – an iconoclastic combination of entrepreneur, inventor, and unintended detective – to accomplish the first successful manned lunar landing as his entirely private venture, in the face the inexplicable mid-flight destruction of each of his organization’s spacecraft. Armstrong doesn’t fit the cultural stereotype of inventor or scientist. As characterized by Russell, “Armstrong was a big, tweedy man, burly, broad-shouldered and a heavy punisher of thick-soled shoes. His thinking had a deliberate, ponderous quality. He got places with the same unracy, deceptive speed as a railroad locomotive, but was less noisy.”
While Russell’s story commences in the June issue as a solid – and solidly intriguing – mystery, effectively conveying a sense of wonder; with characters who portend to be more than two-dimensional; the events, plot, and underlying tone gradually change. With the installments in Astounding’s July and and August issues, what had been a tale with an eerie undertone of Fortean inexplicability, technical conjecture (such as the “ipsophone”, a video-telephone imbued with aspects of artificial intelligence – cool! – we’re talking 1948!), and a well-crafted mood of impending threat … gradually and steadily falls flat.
A pity, because to the extent that the story succeeds – and in parts it does succeed, and creatively at that – it does so far more as a hard-boiled (and very ham-fisted) detective tale than science-fiction.
Regardless of the story’s literary quality (I don’t think it’s ever been anthologized) the physical and psychological presence of the aptly named Armstrong (“arm”?! “strong”?! get it??!) remain consistent throughout. Iconoclastic and independent, he’s extremely intelligent, and if need be, a man capable of brute intimidation, self-defense, and violence. He’s also canny, cunning, and psychologically astute. It’s these latter qualities that lead to Armstrong’s discovery – after meeting a police captain – of a most intriguing device, at his residence in the suburbs of New York City.
Correctly suspicious of surveillance by adversaries, on reaching his residence, “…Armstrong cautiously locked himself in, gave the place the once-over.
“Knowing the microphone was there, it didn’t take him long to find it though its discovery proved far more difficult than he’d expected.
“Its hiding place was ingenious enough – a one hundred watt bulb had been extracted from his reading lamp, another and more peculiar bulb fitted in its place.
“It was not until he removed the lamp’s parchment shade that the substitution became apparent.
“Twisting the bulb out of its socket, he examined it keenly.
“It had a dual coiled-coil filament which lit up in normal manner, but its glass envelope was only half the usual size and its plastic base twice the accepted length.
“He smashed the bulb in the fireplace, cracked open the plastic base with the heel of his shoe.
“Splitting wide, the base revealed a closely packed mass of components so extremely tiny that their construction and assembling must have been done under magnification – a highly-skilled watchmaker’s job! The main wires feeding the camouflaging filament ran past either side of this midget apparatus, making no direct connection therewith, but a shiny, spider-thread inductance not as long as a pin was coiled around one wire and derived power from it.
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(July, 1948, page 101)
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“Since there was no external wiring connecting this strange junk with a distant earpiece, and since its Lilliputian output could hardly be impressed upon and extracted from the power mains, there was nothing for it than to presume that it was some sort of screwy converter which turned audio-frequencies into radio or other unimaginable frequencies picked up by listening apparatus fairly close to hand.
“Without subjecting it to laboratory tests, its extreme range was sheer guesswork, but Armstrong was willing to concede it two hundred yards.
“So microscopic was the lay-out that he could examine it only with difficulty, but he could discern enough to decide that this was no tiny but simple transmitter recognizable in terms of Earthly practice.
“The little there was of it appeared outlandish, for its thermionic control was a splinter of flame-specked crystal, resembling pin-fire opal, around which the midget components were clustered.” (July, 1948, pp.116-117)
I’ll not explain the origin of this device (it’d spoil the story should you read it!), but suffice to say that in the world of the “Dreadful Sanctuary”, things and people are not as they seem, in terms of their origin, nature, and purpose.
In our world, however, it seems that Eric Frank Russell created a literary illustration – at least in terms of its diminutive size and the delicacy of its fabrication – of what would in only a few years be known as the integrated circuit.
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.” – Norbert Wiener
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In the summer of 2020, I read a book.
Actually, in 2020 I read several books, and I’m reading a book right now, in 2021: Judgement Night, by Catherine L. Moore. But of last year’s reading, two works – read back to back – have particularly stood out for me: S. Ansky’s (pen name of Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport) The Enemy At His Pleasure, and, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
A central theme of both – viewed from a very distant literary vantage point! – is the sudden and unanticipated transformation of a culture, society, and nation through the development and impact of forces within and without. While in practically ever significant respect the books are vastly dissimilar (not even considering the central fact that Ansky’s is non-fiction and Bradbury’s not) a commonality of their writings is the reaction of people – people as individuals; people collectively – to overwhelming, unexpected, and traumatic social change.
In retrospect, coincidentally or not, how very strange that having read in The Enemy At His Pleasure in April, I finished Bradbury’s novel on a Friday in the latter part of May: While seated in a quiet, shaded garden adjacent to a public library in a (for the time being…) peaceful suburb (was it only a few brief months ago that public libraries maintained full operating hours?) – considering the events would soon follow in the United States, and even beyond in the still-atrophying “West”, shortly thereafter.
Regardless of how the events of 2020 are viewed “now”, I think that future historians – that is, assuming history even survives as an intellectual discipline in the future – will come to understand the events of the past year (primarily in the United States, and secondarily in parts of Western Europe) as having been a kind of antinomian religious frenzy. This strikingly parallels the millenarian social unrest that persisted in central and western Europe from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. But, rather than ostensible (and really, superficial) concerns about “social justice”, the events of 2020 were at heart a reflection of obsessions about the potential loss of social status by a secular (and comfortably insular in that secularity), credentialed, technocratic, entitled, and ultimately quite venal elite.
Or more accurately, “elite”.
Oh, back to the novel at hand…
And while the power and depth of Bradbury’s novel were well forceful enough on their own in literary, emotional, and intellectual terms, the intersection of these qualities with the impact of events in “outside world” – the “real” world – only intensified the validity and force of the book’s message. Or, messages, of which there were several.
And so… This also gave me an appreciation for the quality of Ray Bradbury’s writing, for despite having long been a devotee of science fiction (specifically that of Cordwainer Smith and A.E. van Vogt and Philip K. Dick and Catherine L. Moore and Cyril Kornbluth and Dan Simmons and Poul Anderson; Isaac Asimov not so much and really not at all), this was actually the first time I’d read any of Bradbury’s novels. (Well, I guess people change.) The very antithesis of a “hard SF” writer – though technological conjecture and extrapolation are nonetheless central to his stories – I found that Bradbury excelled in the description of emotion and thought; actions and event; communication and conflict, with a richness of language born of an uncanny (well, sometimes overdone, but it works) use of metaphor and similie.
And, so… In much that same way that my posts combine scans a book or magazine’s cover (and frequently interior) art with excerpts from those publications, this post revisits my earlier post about Fahrenheit 451, which displays the cover art of the book’s first American paperback edition, by displaying the cover of the book’s Del Rey / Ballantine Book edition of April, 1991. As you can see, the central component of Joseph Mugnaini’s art – a “Fireman”, whose fireproof suit is actually made from the torn newspaper pages is wreathed in flames – has been retained from the 1953 edition, but otherwise, the cover is simplified: The Fireman appears in black & white, and there is no background. That’s all there is. For reasons of literary and cultural familiarity, I suppose this was enough.
And… In much the same way that some of my posts – at least, those for the genre of science fiction! – include images of both a book’s cover, and, the cover art of the magazine in which said book was first serialized, this post features images of Fahrenheit 451’s first appearance: The February, 1951, issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Bradbury’s novel, illustrated by Karl Rogers, occupies half the magazine’s length (pages 4 through 61), the other stories being “…And It Comes Out Here” by Lester Del Rey, “The Protector” by Betsy Curtis, “Second Childhood” by Clifford D. Simak, “Two Weeks in August” by Frank M. Robinson, and the second installment of Isaac Asimov’s “Tyrann”.
And… This is an instance most interesting and not uncommon, where the magazine’s cover art has absolutely no relation to the stories within. Entitled “The Tying Down of a Spaceship on Mars in a Desert Sandstorm,” the time-frame (early 50s) subject matter and vivid softness of the colors make the painting easily recognizable as a work of Chesley Bonestell,
And yet… Even as I read Fahrenheit 451, I couldn’t help but notice the way that the world constructed by Ray Bradbury – either through prescience, chance, or an uncanny combination of both – has captured our world: The world of the recent past; the world that exists now, in 2020; the world that seems to await us, even as this second decade of the twenty-first century is shortly drawing to a close. So, I’m presenting excerpts of some (hard to chose!) of the novel’s most crisply and vividly crafted passages, juxtaposed with contemporary symbols that most uncannily match and embody the events, scenes, and characters depicted in these very passages.
Among these excerpts are some videos and book over art that reflect the mood and message of Fahrenheit 451.
The post closes with by Yann Tiersen’s melody “Comptine d’un autre été – “Rhyme for Another Summer”, from the sound-track for trailer of 2001’s Amélie, at Rousseau’s YouTube channel. I chose this because it’s the background theme for the short video, “This Is Our World – I Am Speechless“, in the “middle” of this post.
I wish that Ray Bradbury were with us now, to “illustrate” (pardon the pun!) by words the world we now inhabit. But, he is not. He died in 2012, only eight years by the measure of time, but another world by the measure of technology.
“We have a good deal of experience as to how the industrialists regard a new industrial potential. Their whole propaganda is to the effect that it must not be considered as the business of the government but must be left open to whatever entrepreneurs wish to invest money in it.”
In the myths and fairy tales that we read as children we learned a few of the simpler and more obvious truths of life, such as that when a djinnee is found in a bottle, it had better be left there; that the fisherman who craves a boon from heaven too many times on behalf of his wife will end up exactly where he started; that if you are given three wishes, you must be very careful what you wish for. These simple and obvious truths represent the childish equivalent of the tragic view of life which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess, and which is somehow missing in this land of plenty.
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”
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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. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?
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…
For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead.
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His wife said, “What are you doing?”
He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.
A minute later she said, “Well, just don’t stand there in the middle of the floor.”
He made a small sound.
“What?” she asked.
He made more soft sounds. He stumbled towards the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. 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. But Montag said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet. (41)
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And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty. (44)
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A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom … and you fell so fast you didn’t touch the sides either … never … quite … touched … anything.
The thunder faded. The music died.
“There,” said Mildred,
And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened. Even though the people in the walls of the room had barely moved, and nothing had really been settled, you had the impression that someone had turned on a washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music and pure cacophony. He came out of the room sweating and on the point of collapse. Behind him, Mildred sat in her chair and the voices went on again: (45)
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He had chills and fever in the morning.
“You can’t be sick,” said Mildred.
He closed his eyes over the hotness. “Yes.”
“But you were all right last night.”
“No, I wasn’t all right.” He heard the “relatives” shouting in the parlor.
Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of 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 white bacon. He could remember her no other way. (48)
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“No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me the rest of my life. God! I’ve been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I’m crazy with trying.”
“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.”
The parlor was playing a dance tune.
“This is the day you go on the early shift,” said Mildred. “You should have gone two hours ago. I just noticed.”
“It’s not just the woman that died,” said Montag. “Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before.” He got out of bed. (51)
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And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the ceiling and the pump-snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes moving in their mouths when they talked. But that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met. He turned away. (52)
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“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!” (55)
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“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.”
“Yes, but what about the firemen, then?” asked Montag.
“Ah.” Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. “What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. 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.
Take the shot from the weapon.
Breach man’s mind.
Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.” (58)
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(Art by Ed Lindlof, for cover of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death – Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1986 Penguin Edition)
Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible 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. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. 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. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.” (61)
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“This Is Our World – I Am Speechless” (creator unknown)
“THESE SYSTEMS ARE FAILING”
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Across the street and down the way the other houses stood with their flat fronts. What was it Clarisse had said one afternoon? “No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking chairs any more. They’re too comfortable. Get people up and running around. My uncle says … and … my uncle … and … my uncle …” Her voice faded. (63)
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The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.
“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. Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don’t hear those idiot bastards in your parlor talking about it. God, Millie, don’t you see? An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe…” (73)
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He could hear Beatty’s voice. “Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.” There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm. (75-76)
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The people who had been sitting a moment before, tapping their feet to the rhythm of Denham’s Dentifrice, Denham’s Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham’s Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice, one two, one two three, one two, one two three. The people whose mouths had been faintly twitching the words Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice. The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run; the great air-train fell down its shaft in the earth. (79)
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“It looks like a Seashell radio.”
“And something more! It listens! If you put it in your ear, Montag, I can sit comfortably home, warming my frightened bones, and hear and analyze the firemen’s world, find its weaknesses, without danger. I’m the Queen Bee, safe in the hive. You will be the drone, the travelling ear. Eventually, I could put out ears into all parts of the city, with various men, listening and evaluating. If the drones die, I’m still safe at home, tending my fright with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of chance. See how safe I play it, how contemptible I am?” (90)
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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 found himself at the parlor door with his food still in his mouth. (93)
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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 enameled 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 colorful 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. So it was now, in his own parlor, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned forward at the sound of Montag’s swallowing his final bite of food. They listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that if you touched these three staring brows you would feel a fine salt sweat on your finger-tips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the sub-audible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode. (95)
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The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness: (99)
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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. If Beatty so much as breathed on them, Montag felt that his hands might wither, turn over on their sides, and never be shocked to life again; they would be buried the rest of his life in his coat-sleeves, forgotten. 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. (105)
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There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms. Montag drifted about as if still another incomprehensible storm had turned him, to see Stoneman and Black wielding axes, shattering window-panes to provide cross-ventilation. (114)
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Nowhere. There was nowhere to go, no friend to turn to, really. Except Faber. And then he realized that he was indeed, running toward Faber’s house, instinctively. But Faber couldn’t hide him; it would be suicide even to try. But he knew that he would go to see Faber anyway, for a few short minutes. Faber’s would be the place where he might refuel his fast draining belief in his own ability to survive. He just wanted to know that there was a man like Faber in the world. He wanted to see the man alive and not burned back there like a body shelled in another body. And some of the money must be left with Faber, of course, to be spent after Montag ran on his way. Perhaps he could make the open country and live on or near the rivers and near the highways, in the fields and hills.
A great whirling whisper made him look to the sky.
The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the grey head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried, wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the sir, continuing their search. (125)
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There it lay, a game for him to win, a vast bowling alley in the cool morning. The boulevard was as clean as the surface of an arena two minutes before the appearance of certain unnamed victims and certain unknown killers. The air over and above the vast concrete river trembled with the warmth of Montag’s body alone; it was incredible how he felt his temperature could cause the whole immediate world to vibrate. He was a phosphorescent target; he knew it, he felt it. And now he must begin his little walk. (126)
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He was three hundred yards downstream when the Hound reached the river. Overhead the great racketing fans of the helicopters hovered. A storm of light fell upon the river and Montag dived under the great illumination as if the sun had broken the clouds. He felt the river pull him further on its way, into darkness. Then the lights switched back to the land, the helicopters swerved over the city again, as if they had picked up another trail. They were gone. The Hound was gone. Now there was only the cold river and Montag floating in a sudden peacefulness, away from the city and the lights and the chase, away from everything.
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills: For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him.
He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood. (140)
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(Art by Guy Billout, for cover of Thedore Roszak’s The Cult of Information – The Folklore of Computers And the True Art of Thinking, 1986 Pantheon Books Edition)
“Listen,” said Granger, taking his arm, and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass. “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. 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. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
***
Granger stood looking back with Montag. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” (156-157)
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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 crushed himself down, squeezing himself small, eyes tight. He blinked once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other.
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Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and Lt. “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens), commander and medical officer of Starship C-57D, in Forbidden Planet (1956)
Adams: So you took the brain boost, huh?
Ostrow: You ought’a see my new mind. It’s up there in lights. Bigger than his now.
C’mon, easy, doc!
Morbius, was too close to the problem. The Krell had completed their project. Big machine. No instrumentalities. True creation!
C’mon doc, let’s have it.
But the Krell forgot one thing!
Yes, what?!
Monsters, John. Monsters from the id!
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For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead. (160)
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And so, we return to where we began: summer’s end.
