Montag prompts: "And then?"
"Why, life happened to me." The Fire Chief shuts his eyes to remember. "Life. The usual. The same. The love that wasn't quite right, the dream that went sour, the sex that fell apart, the deaths that came to friends not deserving, the murder of someone or another, the insanity of someone close, the slow death of a mother, the abrupt suicide of a father - a stampede of elephants, an onslaught of disease. And nowhere, nowhere the right book for the right time to stuff in the crumbling wall of the broken dam to hold back the deluge, give or take a metaphor, lose or find a simile."
A respectful dusty stifling silence humming in the air.
Out the window, a red and a blue and a black flash of drivers rushing on their way to nowhere and a rare pedestrian huddling for safety on the thinning sidewalk.
A dark-haired boy standing alone, lost between the shelves, agony writhing in his eyes.
None of it meant anything!
The boy let a page rise and fall of its own will to join its brothers on the other side of his sweating hand.
"WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."
He stared, brows furrowed, at the words. The pretty sloping shapes that once gracefully trudged their melancholy but somehow friendly dance for him, whispered to him alone in his room, now jumped and slid over his eyes, laughing, like water hissing through his fingers, and no matter how loudly he shouted at it the water would not slow down for him. Pretty shapes on a pretty page that did not smell like anything.
"War is Peace," it said, smugly.
How, Beatty screamed. How can that be? That doesn't make any sense, that doesn't mean anything!
"Freedom is Slavery."
The pretty melancholy words had made sense, had meant something, once. They meant something important. They were life and death themselves, and he knew them, probed them, understood them, examined them from all angles like a statue in a museum, like he knew life and knew death. But now he did not know them, could not see them aside from the pretty shapes they made. Friends stripped of their fingers and stripped of their faces until they were just so many mannequins posed in a window. They had meant something, once, once, once... once upon a time...
"Ignorance is Strength."
The shapes looked so reasonable, so quiet, so satisfied in themselves, so why did Beatty feel like screaming, shouting, killing, ripping, burning?
His eyes did the burning for him as the book fell, still whispering in that horrible hissing heart-wrenching language that he could not hear, to the floor and spread at his feet like a dying bird, wings burnt and blackened but still newspaper-white and beautiful, whispering to a boy that could not hear.
The shelves closed in above him, around him, all whispering, all begging to be taken home and leafed through, dribbled on, loved. Names like Asimov and Plato and Keats smiled down on him, a friend who - once! - knew them well. He pulled them all from the shelves, twitching with a frozen fire. Tore them open. Looked at the pages.
They were all empty!
They were all pretty shapes and whirls of black print and silly words that didn't mean anything. Empty, empty, empty!
A pile of corpses lay at Beatty's feet, their whispers fading into nothing, nothing, silence.
He ran all the way home.
Hours later, he sat doubled over on his bed, crying - why? How? His eyes were empty, his ears were empty, his head was empty. No, not empty. Filled. Filled so that there was no room for melancholy butterflies whispering secret words in their strange tongues.
Very softly, in the parlor, the frenzied screaming raw energy of a mad insane blazing inferno floated under the door and melted into the cotton slush that filled him to overflowing and ignited, a single flickering flame, somewhere in his toes.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.