#2

Our dear and beloved protag, Montag, is left reeling by the burning woman. He comes home mid-existential crisis and realizes his wife has been a stranger all along, someone who has lived with him but has never truly known him. He wakes up sick the next morning, still feeling the fever-like heat of the flames that brought about that woman's end. Montag knows that, like her, he will never escape those flames as long as he lives, and there is no way he can return to the fire station with a clear state of mind.

He tells Mildred as much, but there is a disconnect in communication between the two so visible that it's almost as if they're on two slightly different planes of existence, as if she is present but absent all the same, and she responds superficially without truly hearing his words. It is a very strange dynamic, made even more evident by the fact that apparently neither of them can remember how they met each other.

Anyway, Montag's boss, Captain Beatty, shows up, having understood that Montag's sickness derived from his experience watching the woman burn. He explains to him that their job as firemen is to keep the people docile and happy, burning the fiction that spreads lies and the nonfiction that promotes counter-ideology and subsequent conflict. And conflict is the enemy. Critical thinking is the enemy, and Montag and Beatty share the all-important mediatory role of censorship. It is during this section that, with all the feeble dramatics of this sentence I am writing, Montag finds out Clarisse is dead (four days postmortem).

I don't know if this counts as a text-to-text connection, but there is a storyline present within it so I'll state my thoughts: the burning woman reminds me of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself on fire to protest the persecution of Buddhists. He is the focal point of that iconic image in which he suffers silently: 

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia?

In F421, the woman burns along with her books to prove a point that Montag extrapolates on later--that burning a book is equivalent to burning a person. "...[F]or 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 before."

I can relate in particular to Montag's conclusion that a person he's considered himself close to by conventionality alone for years is truly a stranger, and Clarisse, the neighbor girl who didn't know him a month, was a dearer person to him in the end. Though he can't remember her face, just as he can't remember where he met his wife. It seems that the systematic dulling down of intellect hasn't spared him. I also feel somewhat strange when I haven't read in a long time, like I'm looking through a magnifying glass that has a lens too hazy and fogged to make images of.