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thomas heck - fahrenheit 451 lyrics

“when did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come
about, where, when? well, i’d say it really got started around about a
thing called the civil war. even though our rule-book claims it was
founded earlier. the fact is we didn’t get along well until photography
came into its own. then–motion pictures in the early twentieth
century. radio. television. things began to have m-ss.”
montag sat in bed, not moving
“and because they had m-ss, they became simpler,” said beatty
“once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. they could afford to be different. the world was roomy. but then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. double, triple, quadruple population. films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?”

“picture it. nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. books cut shorter. condensations, digests. tabloids. everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”

“cl-ssics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill
a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. i exaggerate, of course. the dictionaries were for reference. but many were those whose sole knowledge of hamlet (you know the t-tle certainly, montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a t-tle to you, mrs. montag) whose sole knowledge, as i say, of hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the cl-ssics; keep up with your neighbors. do you see? out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

“speed up the film, montag, quick. cl!ck? pic? look, eye, now, fl!ck, 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!”

“school is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories
languages dropped, english and spelling gradually neglected, finally
almost completely ignored. life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure
lies all about after work. why learn anything save pressing b-ttons
pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”

“the zipper displaces the b-tton and a man lacks just that much
time to think while dressing at. dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a
melancholy hour.”

“life becomes one big pratfall, montag; everything bang; boff, and
wow!”

“empty the theatres save for clowns and furnish the rooms with
gl-ss walls and pretty colors running up and down the walls like
confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne. you like baseball, don’t you, montag?”

“more sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to
think, eh? organize and organize and super organize super-super
sports. more cartoons in books. more pictures. the mind drinks less and less. impatience. highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. the gasoline refugee. towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following
the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and i the night before.”
mildred went out of the room and slammed the door. the parlor
“aunts” began to laugh at the parlor “uncles.”
“now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we?
bigger the population, the more minorities. don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, mormons, baptists, unitarians, second-generation chinese, swedes, italians, germans, texans, brooklynites, irishmen, people from oregon or mexico. the people in this book, this play, this tv serial are not meant to represent any actual
painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. the bigger your market, montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! all the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. they did. magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. books, so the d-mned sn0bbish critics said, were dishwater. no wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. but the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comicbooks survive. and the three-dimensional s-x-magazines, of course. 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, m-ss 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.”

“what more easily explained and natural? with school turning
out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, sn-tchers, 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 cl-ss 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 const-tution 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 -ssumption 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.”
the door to the parlor opened and mildred stood there looking in
at them, looking at beatty and then at montag. behind her the walls of
the room were flooded with green and yellow and orange fireworks
sizzling and bursting to some music composed almost completely of
trap drums, tom-toms, and cymbals. her mouth moved and she was
saying something but the sound covered it
beatty knocked his pipe into the palm of his pink hand, studied
the ashes as if they were a symbol to be diagnosed and searched for
meaning
“you must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t
have our minorities upset and stirred. ask yourself, what do we want
in this country, above all? people want to be happy, isn’t that right?
haven’t you heard it all your life? i want to be happy, people say. well
aren’t they? don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun?
that’s all we live for, isn’t it? for pleasure, for t-tillation? and you must
admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

- thomas heck lyrics

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