Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line.

Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury

"The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

In melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

The chairs creaked under the three women. Montag finished it out:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems 

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So curious, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Mrs. Phelps was crying.

The others in the middle of the desert watched her crying grow very loud as her face squeezed itself out of shape. They sat, not touching her, bewildered with her display. She sobbed uncontrollably. Montag himself was stunned and shaken."

(pp. 96-7)