Текст книги "Fahrenheit 451 / 451 градус по Фаренгейту"

Beatty got up. “I must be going. Lecture’s over. I hope I’ve clarified things. 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. Hold steady. Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don’t think you realize how important you are, to our happy world as it stands now.”

Beatty shook Montag’s limp hand. Montag still sat, as if the house were collapsing about him and he could not move, in the bed. Mildred had vanished from the door.

“One last thing,” said Beatty. “At least once in his career, every fireman gets an itch. What do the books say, he wonders. Oh, to scratch that itch, eh? Well, Montag, take my word for it, I’ve had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They’re about non?existent people, figments of imagination, if they’re fiction. And if they’re non-fiction, it’s worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another’s gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost.”

“Well, then, what if a fireman accidentally, really not, intending anything, takes a book home with him?”

Montag twitched. The open door looked at him with its great vacant eye.

“A natural error. Curiosity alone,” said Beatty. “We don’t get over-anxious or mad. We let the fireman keep the book twenty four hours. If he hasn’t burned it by then, we simply come and burn it for him.”

“Of course.” Montag’s mouth was dry.

“Well, Montag. Will you take another, later shift, today? Will we see you tonight perhaps?”

“I don’t know,” said Montag.

“What?” Beatty looked faintly surprised.

Montag shut his eyes. “I’ll be in later. Maybe.”

“We’d certainly miss you if you didn’t show,” said Beatty, putting his pipe in his pocket thoughtfully.

I’ll never come in again, thought Montag.

“Get well and keep well,” said Beatty.

He turned and went out through the open door.

Montag watched through the window as Beatty drove away in his gleaming yellow-flame-coloured beetle with the black, char?coloured tyres.

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.

Montag turned and looked at his wife, who sat in the middle of the parlour talking to an announcer, who in turn was talking to her.

“Mrs. Montag,” he was saying. This, that and the other. “Mrs. Montag?” Something else and still another. The converter attachment, which had cost them one hundred dollars, automatically supplied her name whenever the announcer addressed his anonymous audience, leaving a blank where the proper syllables could be filled in. A special spot?wavex?scrambler also caused his televised image, in the area immediately about his lips, to mouth the vowels and consonants beautifully. He was a friend, no doubt of it, a good friend. “Mrs. Montag… now look right here.”

Her head turned. Though she quite obviously was not listening.

Montag said, “It’s only a step from not going to work today to not working tomorrow, to not working at the firehouse ever again.”

“You are going to work tonight, though, aren’t you?” said Mildred.

“I haven’t decided. Right now I’ve got an awful feeling I want to smash things and kill things:’

“Go take the beetle.”

“No thanks.”

“The keys to the beetle are on the night table. I always like to drive fast when I feel that way. You get it up around ninetyfive and you feel wonderful. Sometimes I drive all night and come back and you don’t know it. It’s fun out in the country. You hit rabbits, sometimes you hit dogs. Go take the beetle.”

“No, I don’t want to, this time. I want to hold on to this funny thing. God, it’s gotten big on me. I don’t know what it is. I’m so damned unhappy, I’m so mad, and I don’t know why I feel like I’m putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I’ve been saving up a lot of things, and don’t know what. I might even start reading books.”

“They’d put you in jail, wouldn’t they?” She looked at him as if he were behind the glass wall.

He began to put on his clothes, moving restlessly about the bedroom.

“Yes, and it might be a good idea. Before I hurt someone. Did you hear Beatty? Did you listen to him? He knows all the answers. He’s right. Happiness is important. Fun is everything. And yet I kept sitting there saying to myself, I’m not happy, I’m not happy.”

“I am.” Mildred’s mouth beamed. “And proud of it.”

“I’m going to do something,” said Montag. “I don’t even know what yet, but I’m going to do something big.”

“I’m tired of listening to this junk,” said Mildred, turning from him to the announcer again.

Montag touched the volume control in the wall and the announcer was speechless.

“Millie?” He paused. “This is your house as well as mine. I feel it’s only fair that I tell you something now. I should have told you before, but I wasn’t even admitting it to myself. I have something I want you to see, something I’ve put away and hid during the past year, now and again, once in a while, I didn’t know why, but I did it and I never told you.”

He took hold of a straight-backed chair and moved it slowly and steadily into the hall near the front door and climbed up on it and stood for a moment like a statue on a pedestal, his wife standing under him, waiting. Then he reached up and pulled back the grille of the air-conditioning system and reached far back inside to the right and moved still another sliding sheet of metal and took out a book. Without looking at it he dropped it to the floor. He put his hand back up and took out two books and moved his hand down and dropped the two books to the floor. He kept moving his hand and dropping books, small ones, fairly large ones, yellow, red, green ones. When he was done he looked down upon some twenty books lying at his wife’s feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t really think. But now it looks as if we’re in this together.”

Mildred backed away as if she were suddenly confronted by a pack of mice that had come up out of the floor. He could hear her breathing rapidly and her face was paled out and her eyes were fastened wide. She said his name over, twice, three times. Then moaning, she ran forward, seized a book and ran toward the kitchen incinerator.

He caught her, shrieking. He held her and she tried to fight away from him, scratching.

“No, Millie, no! Wait! Stop it, will you? You don’t know… stop it!” He slapped her face, he grabbed her again and shook her.

She said his name and began to cry.

“Millie!” he said. “Listen. Give me a second, will you? We can’t do anything. 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. You must help me.” He looked down into her face and took hold of her chin and held her firmly. He was looking not only at her, but for himself and what he must do, in her face. “Whether we like this or not, we’re in it. I’ve never asked for much from you in all these years, but I ask it now, I plead for it. We’ve got to start somewhere here, figuring out why we’re in such a mess, you and the medicine at night, and the car, and me and my work. We’re heading right for the cliff, Millie. God, I don’t want to go over. This isn’t going to be easy. We haven’t anything to go on, but maybe we can piece it out and figure it and help each other. I need you so much right now, I can’t tell you. If you love me at all you’ll put up with this, twenty four, forty eight hours, that’s all I ask, then it’ll be over. I promise, I swear! And if there is something here, just one little thing out of a whole mess of things, maybe we can pass it on to someone else.”

She wasn’t fighting any more, so he let her go. She sagged away from him and slid down the wall, and sat on the floor looking at the books. Her foot touched one and she saw this and pulled her foot away.

“That woman, the other night, Millie, you weren’t there. You didn’t see her face. And Clarisse. You never talked to her. I talked to her. And men like Beatty are afraid of her. I can’t understand it. Why should they be so afraid of someone like her? But I kept putting her alongside the firemen in the house last night, and I suddenly realized I didn’t like them at all, and I didn’t like myself at all any more. And I thought maybe it would be best if the firemen themselves were burnt.”

“Guy!”

The front door voice called softly:

“Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone here, someone here, Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone here.”

Softly.

They turned to stare at the door and the books toppled everywhere, everywhere in heaps.

“Beatty!” said Mildred.

“It can’t be him.”

“He’s come back!” she whispered.

The front door voice called again softly. “Someone here…”

“We won’t answer.”

Montag lay back against the wall and then slowly sank to a crouching position and began to nudge the books, bewilderedly, with his thumb, his forefinger. He was shivering and he wanted above all to shove the books up through the ventilator again, but he knew he could not face Beatty again. He crouched and then he sat and the voice of the front door spoke again, more insistently. Montag picked a single small volume from the floor.

“Where do we begin?” He opened the book half-way and peered at it. “We begin by beginning, I guess.”

“He’ll come in,” said Mildred, “and burn us and the books!”

The front door voice faded at last. There was a silence. Montag felt the presence of someone beyond the door, waiting, listening. Then the footsteps going away down the walk and over the lawn.

“Let’s see what this is,” said Montag.

He spoke the words haltingly and with a terrible selfconsciousness. He read a dozen pages here and there and came at last to this:

“It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break eggs at the smaller end.”

Mildred sat across the hall from him. “What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything! The Captain was right!”

“Here now,” said Montag. “We’ll start over again, at the beginning.”

Part II
The Sieve and the Sand

They read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlour was so empty and grey-looking without its walls lit with orange and yellow confetti and sky-rockets and women in gold-mesh dresses and men in black velvet pulling one-hundred-pound rabbits from silver hats. 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.

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over, so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

Montag sat listening to the rain.

“Is that what it was in the girl next door? I’ve tried so hard to figure.”

“She’s dead. Let’s talk about someone alive, for goodness’ sake.”

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.

He opened another book.

“That favourite subject, Myself.”

He squinted at the wall.

“The favourite subject, Myself.”

“I understand that one,” said Mildred.

“But Clarisse’s favourite subject wasn’t herself. It was everyone else, and me. She was the first person in a good many years I’ve really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted.” He lifted the two books. “These men have been dead a long time, but I know their words point, one way or another, to Clarisse.”

Outside the front door, in the rain, a faint scratching.

Montag froze. He saw Mildred thrust herself back to the wall and gasp.

“Someone – the door – why doesn’t the door-voice tell us – ”

“I shut it off.”

Under the door-sill, a slow, probing sniff, an exhalation of electric steam.

Mildred laughed.

“It’s only a dog, that’s what! You want me to shoo him away?”

“Stay where you are!”

Silence. The cold rain falling. And the smell of blue electricity blowing under the locked door.

“Let’s get back to work,” said Montag quietly.

Mildred kicked at a book.

“Books aren’t people. You read and I look around, but there isn’t anybody!”

He stared at the parlour that was dead and grey as the waters of an ocean that might teem with life if they switched on the electronic sun.

“Now,” said Mildred, “my ‘family’ is people. They tell me things; I laugh, they laugh! And the colours!”

“Yes, I know.”

“And besides, if Captain Beatty knew about those books – ” She thought about it. Her face grew amazed and then horrified. “He might come and bum the house and the ‘family.’ That’s awful! Think of our investment. Why should I read? What for?”

“What for! Why!” said Montag. “I saw the damnedest snake in the world the other night. It was dead but it was alive. It could see but it couldn’t see. You want to see that snake. It’s at Emergency Hospital where they filed a report on all the junk the snake got out of you! Would you like to go and check their file? Maybe you’d look under Guy Montag or maybe under Fear or War. Would you like to go to that house that burnt last night? And rake ashes for the bones of the woman who set fire to her own house! What about Clarisse McClellan, where do we look for her? The morgue! Listen!”

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 rumours; 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 rumours 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 parlour talking about it. God, Millie, don’t you see? An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe…”

The telephone rang. Mildred snatched the phone.

“Ann!” She laughed. “Yes, the White Clown’s on tonight!”

Montag walked to the kitchen and threw the book down. “Montag,” he said, “you’re really stupid. Where do we go from here? Do we turn the books in, forget it?”

He opened the book to read over Mildred’s laughter. Poor Millie, he thought. Poor Montag, it’s mud to you, too. But where do you get help, where do you find a teacher this late?

Hold on. He shut his eyes. Yes, of course. Again he found himself thinking of the green park a year ago. The thought had been with him many times recently, but now he remembered how it was that day in the city park when he had seen that old man in the black suit hide something, quickly in his coat.

…The old man leapt up as if to run. And Montag said, “Wait!”

“I haven’t done anything!” cried the old man trembling.

“No one said you did.”

They had sat in the green soft light without saying a word for a moment, and then Montag talked about the weather, and then the old man responded with a pale voice. It was a strange quiet meeting. 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. His name was Faber, and when he finally lost his fear of Montag, he talked in a cadenced voice, looking at the sky and the trees and the green park, and when an hour had passed he said something to Montag and Montag sensed it was a rhymeless poem. Then the old man grew even more courageous and said something else and that was a poem, too. Faber held his hand over his left coat-pocket and spoke these words gently, and Montag knew if he reached out, he might pull a book of poetry from the man’s coat. But he did not reach out. His. hands stayed on his knees, numbed and useless.

“I don’t talk things, sir,” said Faber. “I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.”

That was all there was to it, really. An hour of monologue, a poem, a comment, and then without even acknowledging the fact that Montag was a fireman, Faber with a certain trembling, wrote his address on a slip of paper. “For your file,” he said, “in case you decide to be angry with me.”

“I’m not angry,” Montag said, surprised.

Mildred shrieked with laughter in the hall.

Montag went to his bedroom closet and flipped through his file-wallet to the heading: FUTURE INVESTIGATIONS (?). Faber’s name was there. He hadn’t turned it in and he hadn’t erased it.

He dialled the call on a secondary phone. The phone on the far end of the line called Faber’s name a dozen times before the professor answered in a faint voice. Montag identified himself and was met with a lengthy silence.

“Yes, Mr. Montag?”

“Professor Faber, I have a rather odd question to ask. How many copies of the Bible are left in this country?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I want to know if there are any copies left at all.”

“This is some sort of a trap! I can’t talk to just anyone on the phone!”

“How many copies of Shakespeare and Plato?”

“None! You know as well as I do. None!”

Faber hung up.

Montag put down the phone. None. A thing he knew of course from the firehouse listings. But somehow he had wanted to hear it from Faber himself.

In the hall Mildred’s face was suffused with excitement.

“Well, the ladies are coming over!”

Montag showed her a book. “This is the Old and New Testament, and…”

“Don’t start that again!”

“It might be the last copy in this part of the world.”

“You’ve got to hand it back tonight, don’t you know? Captain Beatty knows you’ve got it, doesn’t he?”

“I don’t think he knows which book I stole. But how do I choose a substitute? Do I turn in Mr. Jefferson? Mr. Thoreau? Which is least valuable? If I pick a substitute and Beatty does know which book I stole, he’ll guess we’ve an entire library here!”

Mildred’s mouth twitched.

“See what you’re doing? You’ll ruin us! Who’s more important, me or that Bible?”

She was beginning to shriek now, sitting there like a wax doll melting in its own heat.

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, chainsmoking, 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.

Mildred stopped screaming as quickly as she started. Montag was not listening.

“There’s only one thing to do,” he said. “Some time before tonight when I give the book to Beatty, I’ve got to have a duplicate made.”

“You’ll be here for the White Clown tonight, and the ladies coming over?” cried Mildred.

Montag stopped at the door, with his back turned. “Millie?”

A silence.

“What?”

“Millie? Does the White Clown love you?”

No answer.

“Millie, does – ” He licked his lips. “Does your ‘family’ love you, love you very much, love you with all their heart and soul, Millie?”

He felt her blinking slowly at the back of his neck.

“Why’d you ask a silly question like that?”

He felt he wanted to cry, but nothing would happen to his eyes or his mouth.

“If you see that dog outside,” said Mildred, “give him a kick for me.”

He hesitated, listening at the door. He opened it and stepped out.

The rain had stopped and the sun was setting in the clear sky. The street and the lawn and the porch were empty. He let his breath go in a great sigh.

He slammed the door.

He was on the subway.

I’m numb, he thought. When did the numbness really begin in my face? In my body? The night I kicked the pill-bottle in the dark, like kicking a buried mine.

The numbness will go away, he thought. It’ll take time, but I’ll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that’s gone. I’m lost without it.

The subway fled past him, cream-tile, jet-black, cream-tile, jet-black, numerals and darkness, more darkness and the total adding itself.

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!” And the faster he poured, the faster it sifted through with a hot whispering. His hands were tired, the sand was boiling, the sieve was empty. Seated there in the midst of July, without a sound, he felt the tears move down his cheeks.

Now as the vacuum-underground rushed him through the dead cellars of town, jolting him, he remembered the terrible logic of that sieve, and he looked down and saw that he was carrying the Bible open. There were people in the suction train but he held the book in his hands and the silly thought came to him, if you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve. But he read and the words fell through, and he thought, in a few hours, there will be Beatty, and here will be me handing this over, so no phrase must escape me, each line must be memorized. I will myself to do it.

He clenched the book in his fists.

Trumpets blared.

“Denham’s Dentrifice.”

Shut up, thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field.

“Denham’s Dentifrice.”

They toil not —

“Denham’s…”

Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up.

“Dentifrice!”

He tore the book open and flicked the pages and felt them as if he were blind, he picked at the shape of the individual letters, not blinking.

“Denham’s. Spelled: D-E-N”

They toil not, neither do they…

A fierce whisper of hot sand through empty sieve.

“Denham’s does it!”

Consider the lilies, the lilies, the lilies…

“Denham’s dental detergent.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” 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 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 wcre pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run; the great air-train fell down its shaft in the earth.

“Lilies of the field.”

“Denham’s.”

“Lilies, I said!”

The people stared.

“Call the guard.”

“The man’s off – ”

“Knoll View!”

The train hissed to its stop.

“Knoll View!” A cry.

“Denham’s.” A whisper.

Montag’s mouth barely moved.

“Lilies…”

The train door whistled open. Montag stood. The door gasped, started shut. Only then. did he leap past the other passengers, screaming in his mind, plunge through the slicing door only in time. He ran on the white tiles up through the tunnels, ignoring the escalators, because he wanted to feel his feet-move, arms swing, lungs clench, unclench, feel his throat go raw with air. A voice drifted after him, “Denham’s Denham’s Denham’s,” the train hissed like a snake. The train vanished in its hole.

“Who is it?”

“Montag out here.”

“What do you want?”

“Let me in.”

“I haven’t done anything!”

“I’m alone, dammit!”

“You swear it?”

“I swear!”

The front door opened slowly. Faber peered out, looking very old in the light and very fragile and very much afraid. The old man looked as if he had not been out of the house in years. He and the white plaster walls inside were much the same. There was white in the flesh of his mouth and his cheeks and his hair was white and his eyes had faded, with white in the vague blueness there. Then his eyes touched on the book under Montag’s arm and he did not look so old any more and not quite as fragile. Slowly his fear went.

“I’m sorry. One has to be careful.”

He looked at the book under Montag’s arm and could not stop.

“So it’s true.”

Montag stepped inside. The door shut.

“Sit down.”

Faber backed up, as if he feared the book might vanish if he took his eyes from it. 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. His gaze returned unsteadily to Montag, who was now seated with the book in his lap.

“The book-where did you-?”

“I stole it.”

Faber, for the first time, raised his eyes and looked directly into Montag’s face.

“You’re brave.”

“No,” said Montag. “My wife’s dying. A friend of mine’s already dead. Someone who may have been a friend was burnt less than twenty-four hours ago. You’re the only one I knew might help me. To see. To see…”

Faber’s hands itched on his knees.

“May I?”

“Sorry.” Montag gave him the book.

“It’s been a long time. I’m not a religious man. But it’s been a long time.” Faber turned the pages, stopping here and there to read. “It’s as good as I remember. Lord, how they’ve changed itin our ‘parlours’ these days. Christ is one of the ‘family’ now. I often wonder it God recognizes His own son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He’s a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn’t making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshipper absolutely needs.”

Faber sniffed the book.

“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.”

Faber turned the pages.

“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.”

Faber closed the Bible.

“Well – suppose you tell me why you came here?”

“Nobody listens any more. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.”

Faber examined Montag’s thin, blue-jowled face. “How did you get shaken up?

What knocked the torch out of your hands?”

“I don’t know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.”

“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. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. 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. Of course you couldn’t know this, of course you still can’t understand what I mean when I say all this. You are intuitively right, that’s what counts. Three things are missing.

“Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.