by Ray Bradbury
If it be no lack of modesty to mention my own works, it must here be confessed that I looked for them with fatherly interest, but in vain. Too probably they were changed to vapor by the first action of the heat; at best, I can only hope that, in their quiet way, they contributed a glimmering spark or two to the splendor of the evening.
“Alas! and woe is me!” thus bemoaned himself a heavy-looking gentleman in green spectacles. “The world is utterly ruined, and there is nothing to live for any longer. The business of my life is snatched from me. Not a volume to be had for love or money!”
“This,” remarked the sedate observer beside me, “is a bookworm—one of those men who are born to gnaw dead thoughts. His clothes, you see, are covered with the dust of libraries. He has no inward fountain of ideas; and, in good earnest, now that the old stock is abolished, I do not see what is to become of the poor fellow. Have you no word of comfort for him?”
“My dear sir,” said I to the desperate bookworm, “is not Nature better than a book? Is not the human heart deeper than any system of philosophy? Is not life replete with more instruction than past observers have found it possible to write down in maxims? Be of good cheer. The great book of Time is still spread wide open before us; and, if we read it aright, it will be to us a volume of eternal truth.”
“Oh, my books, my books, my precious printed books!” reiterated the forlorn bookworm. “My only reality was a bound volume; and now they will not leave me even a shadowy pamphlet!”
In fact, the last remnant of the literature of all the ages was now descending upon the blazing heap in the shape of a cloud of pamphlets from the press of the New World. These likewise were consumed in the twinkling of an eye, leaving the earth, for the first time since the days of Cadmus, free from the plague of letters—an enviable field for the authors of the next generation.
“Well, and does anything remain to be done?” inquired I somewhat anxiously. “Unless we set fire to the earth itself, and then leap boldly off into infinite space, I know not that we can carry reform to any farther point.”
“You are vastly mistaken, my good friend,” said the observer. “Believe me, the fire will not be allowed to settle down without the addition of fuel that will startle many persons who have lent a willing hand thus far.”
Nevertheless there appeared to be a relaxation of effort for a little time, during which, probably, the leaders of the movement were considering what should be done next. In the interval, a philosopher threw his theory into the flames— a sacrifice which, by those who knew how to estimate it, was pronounced the most remarkable that had yet been made. The combustion, however, was by no means brilliant. Some indefatigable people, scorning to take a moment’s ease, now employed themselves in collecting all the withered leaves and fallen boughs of the forest, and thereby recruited the bonfire to a greater height than ever. But this was mere by-play.
“Here comes the fresh fuel that I spoke of,” said my companion.
To my astonishment the persons who now advanced into the vacant space around the mountain fire bore surplices and other priestly garments, mitres, crosiers, and a confusion of Popish and Protestant emblems, with which it seemed their purpose to consummate the great act of faith. Crosses from the spires of old cathedrals were cast upon the heap with as little remorse as if the reverence of centuries, passing in long array beneath the lofty towers, had not looked up to them as the holiest of symbols. The font in which infants were consecrated to God, the sacramental vessels whence piety received the hallowed draught, were given to the same destruction. Perhaps it most nearly touched my heart to see among these devoted relics fragments of the humble communion tables and undecorated pulpits which I recognized as having been torn from the meeting-houses of New England. Those simple edifices might have been permitted to retain all of sacred embellishment that their Puritan founders had bestowed, even though the mighty structure of St. Peter’s had sent its spoils to the fire of this terrible sacrifice. Yet I felt that these were but the externals of religion, and might most safely be relinquished by spirits that best knew their deep significance.
“All is well,” said I, cheerfully. “The woodpaths shall be the aisles of our cathedral—the firmament itself shall be its ceiling. What needs an earthly roof between the Deity and his worshippers? Our faith can well afford to lose all the drapery that even the holiest men have thrown around it, and be only the more sublime in its simplicity.”
‘True,” said my companion; “but will they pause here?”
The doubt implied in his question was well founded. In the general destruction of books already described, a holy volume, that stood apart from the catalogue of human literature, and yet, in one sense, was at its head, had been spared. But the Titan of innovation—angel or fiend, double in his nature, and capable of deeds befitting both characters—at first shaking down only the old and rotten shapes of things, had now, as it appeared, laid his terrible hand upon the main pillars which supported the whole edifice of our moral and spiritual state. The inhabitants of the earth had grown too enlightened to define their faith within a form of words, or to limit the spiritual by any analogy to our material existence. Truths which the heavens trembled at were now but a fable of the world’s infancy. Therefore, as the final sacrifice of human error, what else remained to be thrown upon the embers of that awful pile except the book which, though a celestial revelation to past ages, was but a voice from a lower sphere as regarded the present race of man? It was done! Upon the blazing heap of falsehood and wornout truth—things that the earth had never needed, or had ceased to need, or had grown childishly weary of—fell the ponderous church Bible, the great old volume that had lain so long on the cushion of the pulpit, and whence the pastor’s solemn voice had given holy utterance on so many a Sabbath day. There, likewise, fell the family Bible, which the long-buried patriarch had read to his children—in prosperity or sorrow, by the fireside and in the summer shade of trees—and had bequeathed downward as the heirloom of generations. There fell the bosom Bible, the little volume that has been the soul’s friend of some sorely tried child of dust, who thence took courage, whether his trial were for life or death, steadfastly confronting both in the strong assurance of immortality.
All these were flung into the fierce and riotous blaze; and then a mighty wind came roaring across the plain with a desolate howl, as if it were the angry lamentation of the earth for the loss of heaven’s sunshine; and it shook the gigantic pyramid of flame and scattered the cinders of half-consumed abominations around upon the spectators.
“This is terrible!” said I, feeling that my cheek grew pale, and seeing a like change in the visages about me.
“Be of good courage yet,” answered the man with whom I had so often spoken. He continued to gaze steadily at the spectacle with a singular calmness, as if it concerned him merely as an observer. “Be of good courage, nor yet exult too much; for there is far less both of good and evil in the effect of this bonfire than the world might be willing to believe.”
“How can that be?” exclaimed I, impatiently. “Has it not consumed everything? Has it not swallowed up or melted down every human or divine appendage of our mortal state that had substance enough to be acted on by fire? Will there be anything left us tomorrow morning better or worse than a heap of embers and ashes?”
“Assuredly there will,” said my grave friend. “Come hither tomorrow morning, or whenever the combustible portion of the pile shall be quite burned out, and you will find among the ashes everything really valuable that you have seen cast into the flames. Trust me, the world of tomorrow will again enrich itself with the gold and diamonds which have been cast off by the world of today. Not a truth is destroyed nor buried so deep among the ashes but it will be raked up at last.”
This was a strange assurance. Yet I felt inclined to credit it, the more especially as I beheld among the wallowing flames a copy of the Holy Scriptures, the pages of which, instead of being blackened into tinder, only assumed a more dazzling white
ness as the finger marks of human imperfection were purified away. Certain marginal notes and commentaries, it is true, yielded to the intensity of the fiery test, but without detriment to the smallest syllable that had flamed from the pen of inspiration.
“Yes; there is the proof of what you say,” answered I, turning to the observer; “but if only what is evil can feel the action of the fire, then, surely, the conflagration has been of inestimable utility. Yet, if I understand aright, you intimate a doubt whether the world’s expectation of benefit would be realized by it.”
“Listen to the talk of these worthies,” said he, pointing to a group in front of the blazing pile; “possibly they may teach you something useful without intending it.”
The persons whom he indicated consisted of that brutal and most earthy figure who had stood forth so furiously in defence of the gallows—the hangman, in short—together with the last thief and the last murderer, all three of whom were clustered about the last toper. The latter was liberally passing the brandy bottle, which he had rescued from the general destruction of wines and spirits. This little convivial party seemed at the lowest pitch of despondency, as considering that the purified world must needs be utterly unlike the sphere that they had hitherto known, and therefore but a strange and desolate abode for gentlemen of their kidney.
“The best counsel for all of us is,” remarked the hangman, “that, as soon as we have finished the last drop of liquor, I help you, my three friends, to a comfortable end upon the nearest tree, and then hang myself on the same bough. This is no world for us any longer.”
“Poh, poh, my good fellows!” said a dark-complexioned personage, who now joined the group—his complexion was indeed fearfully dark, and his eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire; “be not so cast down, my dear friends; you shall see good days yet. There’s one thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire, and without which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all; yes, though they had burned the earth itself to a cinder.”
“And what may that be?” eargerly demanded the last murderer.
“What but the human heart itself?” said the dark-visaged stranger, with a portentous grin. “And, unless they hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery—the same old shapes or worse ones—which they have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by this livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old world yet!”
This brief conversation supplied me with a theme for lengthened thought. How sad a truth, if true it were, that man’s age-long endeavor for perfection had served only to render him the mockery of the evil principle, from the fatal circumstance of an error at the very root of the matter! The heart, the heart—there was the little yet boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream, so unsubstantial that it matters little whether the bonfire, which I have so faithfully described, were what we choose to call a real event and a flame that would scorch the finger, or only a phosphoric radiance and a parable of my own brain.
1844 Mosses from an Old Manse
BUZBY’S PETRIFIED WOMAN by Loren C. Eisley
I think the sound of the wind in that country never stopped. I think everyone there was a little mad because of it. In the end I suppose I was like all the rest. It was a country of topsy-turvy, where great dunes of sand blew slowly over ranch houses and swallowed them, and where, after the sand had all blown away from under your feet, the beautiful arrowheads of ice-age hunters lay mingled with old whisky bottles that the sun had worked upon. I suppose, now that I stop to think about it, that if there is any place in the world where a man might fall in love with a petrified woman, that may be the place.
In the proper books, you understand, there is no such thing as a petrified woman, and I insist that when I first came to that place I would have said the same. It all happened because bone hunters are listeners. They have to be.
We had had terrible luck that season. We had made queries in a hundred towns, and tramped as many canyons. The institution for which we worked had received a total of one Oligocene turtle and a bag of rhinoceros bones. A rag picker could have done better. The luck had to change. Somewhere there had to be fossils.
I was cogitating on the problem under a coating of lather in a barbershop with an 1890 chair when I became aware of a voice. You can hear a lot of odd conversation in barbershops, particularly in the back country, and particularly if your trade makes you a listener, as mine does. But what caught my ear at first was something about stone. Stone and bone are pretty close in my language and I wasn’t missing any bets. There was always a chance that there might be a bone in it somewhere for me.
The voice went off into a grumbling rural complaint in the back corner of the shop, and then it rose higher.
“It’s petrified! It’s petrified!” the voice contended excitedly.
I managed to push an ear up through the lather.
“I’m a-tellin’ ya,” the man boomed, “a petrified woman, right out in that canyon. But he won’t show it, not to nobody. Tain’t fair, I tell ya.”
“Mister,” I said, speaking warily between the barber’s razor and his thumb, “I’m reckoned a kind of specialist in these matters. Where is this woman, and how do you know she’s petrified?”
I knew perfectly well she wasn’t, of course. Flesh doesn’t petrify like wood or bone, but there are plenty of people who think so. In the course of my life I’ve been offered objects purporting to be everything from petrified butterflies to a gentleman’s top hat.
Just the same I was still interested in this woman. You can never tell what will turn up in the back country. Once, for example, I had a mammoth vertebra handed to me with the explanation that it was a petrified griddle cake. Mentally, now, I was trying to shape that woman’s figure into the likeness of a mastodon’s femur. This is a hard thing to do when you are young and far from the cities. Nevertheless, I managed it. I held that shining bony vision in my head and asked directions of my friend in the barbershop.
Yes, he told me, the woman was petrified all right. Old Man Buzby wasn’t a feller to say it if it ‘tweren’t so. And it weren’t no part of a woman. It was a whole woman. Buzby had said that, too. But Buzby was a queer one. An old bachelor, you know. And when the boys had wanted to see it, ‘count of it bein’ a sort of marvel around these parts, the old man had clammed up on where it was. A-keepin’ it all to his-self, he was. But seein’ as I was interested in these things and a stranger, he might talk to me and no harm done. It was the trail to the right and out and up to the overhang of the hills. A little tar-papered shack there.
I asked Mack to go up there with me. He was silent company but one of the best bone hunters we had. Whether it was a rodent the size of a bee or an elephant the size of a house, he’d find it and he’d get it out even if it meant carrying a five-hundred-pound plaster cast on foot over a mountain range.
In a day we reached it. When I got out of the car I knew the wind had been blowing there since time began. There was a rusty pump in the yard and rusty wire and rusty machines nestled in the lea of a wind-carved butte. Everything was leaching and blowing away by degrees—even the tar-paper on the roof.
Out of the door came Buzby. He was not blowing away, I thought at first. His farm might be, but he wasn’t. There was an air of faded dignity about him.
Now in that country there is a sort of etiquette. You don’t drive out to a man’s place, a bachelor’s, and you a stranger, and come up to his door and say: “I heard in town y
ou got a petrified woman here, and brother, I sure would like to see it.” You’ve got to use tact, same as anywhere else.
You get out slowly while the starved hounds look you over and get their barking done. You fumble for your pipe and explain casually you’re doin’ a little lookin’ around in the hills. About that time they get a glimpse of the equipment you’re carrying and most of them jump to the conclusion that you’re scouting for oil. You can see the hope flame up in their eyes and sink down again as you explain you’re just hunting bones. Some of them don’t believe you after that. It’s a hard thing to murder a poor man’s dream.
But Buzby wasn’t the type. I don’t think he even thought of the oil. He was small and neat and wore—I swear it— pince-nez glasses. I could see at a glance he was a city man dropped, like a seed, by the wind. He had been there a long time, certainly. He knew the corn talk and the heat talk, but he never would learn how to come forward in that secure, heavy-shouldered country way, to lean on a car door and talk to strangers while the horizon stayed in his eyes.
He invited us, instead, to see his collection of arrowheads. It looked like a good start. We dusted ourselves and followed him in. It was a two-room shack, and about as comfortable as a monk’s cell. It was neat, though, so neat you knew the man lived, rather than slept there. It lacked the hound-asleep-in-the-bunk confusion of the usual back-country bachelor’s quarters.
He was precise about his Indian relics as he was precise about everything, but I sensed after a while, a touch of pathos in it—the pathos of a man clinging to order in a world where the wind changed the landscape before morning, and not even a dog could help you contain the loneliness of your days.
