Wherever I land, next time I’ll look close, swear to God.
They ran in urine smell of shadow, they ran in clean ice smell of moon.
The train? Pulled off on a spur in the warming grass, it was old, yes, and welded tight with rust, but it looked like a titanic magnet that had collected to itself, from locomotive boneyards across three continents, drive shafts, fly-wheels, smoke stacks, and hand-me-down second-rate nightmares. It did not cut a black and mortuary silhouette. It asked permission but to lie dead in autumn strewings, so much tired steam and iron gunpowder blowing away.
Mr. Sanderson stood in the sun-blazed door, listening. From a long time ago, when he dreamed as a boy, he remembered the sound. Beautiful creatures leaping under the sky, gone through brush, under trees, away, and only the soft echo their running left behind.
They both stopped to enjoy the swift pound of each other’s heart.
The town was so quiet and far off you could hear only the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the stars.
Behind him the lights of the lonely little store blinked out and there was only a street light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city seemed to be going to sleep.
The Toynbee Convector” was born because of my reaction to the bombardment of despair we so frequently find in our newspaper headlines and television reportage, and the feeling of imminent doom in a society that has triumphed over circumstances again and again, but fails to look back and realize where it has come from, and what it has achieved.
Over the years, they had tuned the walk, prying up an A board and nailing it here, lifting up an F board and pounding it back down there until the walk was as near onto being melodious as weather and two entrepreneurs could fashion it.
Someday you’ll be as old as I. People will say the same. ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘those vultures were never hummingbirds, those owls were never orioles, those parrots were never bluebirds!” One day you’ll be like me!
All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean.
Every night, the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.
And there, in the wilderness, the men all moved their hands, putting out the fire together.
Montag watched the great dust settle and the great silence move down upon their world. And lying there it seemed that he saw every grain of dust and every blade of grass and that he heard every cry and shout and whisper going up in the world now.
He saw the red fire and heard the big sound and felt the huge tremor as the silver rocket shot up and left him behind on an ordinary Monday morning on the ordinary planet Earth.
If the men were silent it was because there was everything to think about and much to remember.
The other men helped, and Montag helped, and there, in the wilderness, the men all moved their hands, putting out the fire together.
Now he knew that he was two people, that he was, above all, Montag who knew nothing, who did not even know himself a fool, but only suspected it.
Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush.
Later in the morning Saul tried to die. He lay on the sand and told his heart to stop. It continued beating. He imagined himself leaping from a cliff or cutting his wrists, but laughed to himself – he knew he lacked the nerve for either act.