"The Lilies of the Field" in Fahrenheit 451

This is just a small point about Fahrenheit 451, but I didn't feel that it went with my other post about smell, so I'm making a separate post for it.

When Montag reads the Bible on the subway, the text includes the phrase "the lilies of the field."  This is from the Sermon on the Mount.  It's a phrase that doesn't seem particularly relevant to the novel, but later it (in its original context) acquires a sort of retrograde importance.

A few pages after Montag rides the subway, he arrives at Faber's house, and they talk about how religion has changed to conform to the "families" in the parlor wall-screens.  Faber says

Christ is one of the "family" now.  I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?  He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.

What Faber says can stand on its own, but - in their original context - "the lilies of the field" that Montag read about while in the subway emphasize it:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on.  Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?  ...  And why are you anxious about clothing?  Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow:  they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  (Matthew 6:25, 28-29)

In that section of the Sermon of the Mount, Christ says to not worry about clothing (and by extension seems to say to not worry about having particular possessions at all), but now - via the perversion of the television parlors - He's made to say the opposite:  that there are "products that every worshiper absolutely needs."

The Dichotomy of Smell in Fahrenheit 451

This post contains spoilers.

Last time I read Fahrenheit 451, I thought there was something more to Faber's comment about book smell ("Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land?") than just an innocuous remark.  So when I recently re-read the book, I paid careful attention to the smells and made a note of each smell and what page* it appears on:

• Clarice says she'd be able to identify Montag with her eyes shut because he smells like kerosene (p. 6).
• The Mechanical Hound's olfactory tracking system is described (p. 25-26).
• Clarice asks Montag, "Have you ever smelled old leaves?  Don't they smell like cinnamon?" (p. 29).
• The Firemen are surrounded by "the continual smell of burning from their pipes" (p. 33).
• Mrs. Blake's attic is described as "musty blackness" (p. 36).
• Mrs. Blake "made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked in [the firemen's] nostrils as they plunged about" (p. 37).
• "Kerosene fumes" and "fumes of kerosene" permeate the air immediately before Mrs. Blake's house burns down (p. 38-39).
• The smell of kerosene makes Montag ill (p. 49).
• "The smell of blue electricity" of the Mechanical Hound snoops outside Montag's door (p. 72).
• Faber describes book smell as "nutmeg" or "spice" (p. 81).
• "Beatty, smelling of the wind through which he had rushed, was at Montag's elbow" (p. 110).
• Montag creeps through "a thick night-moistened scent of daffodils and roses and wet grass" to plant some books in the Blacks' house (p. 129).
• As the televised search for Montag continues, the Hound's nose is extolled (p. 133).
• Montag tells Faber to burn his furniture, rub down the door knobs with alcohol, and turn on his air conditioning and sprinklers to disguise Montag's trail (p. 135).
• "The smell of the river was cool and like a solid rain" (p. 139).
• Montag encounters "the dry smell of hay" now that he's escaped the city (p. 142).
• Montag experiences a "million odors" and "other smells!" as he makes he way further into the country (p. 143-144)
• The smell of the fire around which the literary hobos are warming themselves is different from the smell of fire that Montag is used to, and he imagines himself as an animal that "would smell like autumn" if bled out (p. 146).
• Granger gives Montag a bottle of liquid that will "change the chemical index of [his] perspiration" and make him "smell like two other people" (p. 147).
• "The air was cold and smelled of a coming rain" (p. 162).
• The bacon that the literary hobos cook "filled the morning air with its aroma" (p. 163).

When I finished the book, I looked over this list of smells and I noticed that they fall into two main categories:  there are the natural smells (leaves, spices, plants, hay, rain [ostensibly to contrast with the fire in the city]), and there are the more artificial smells (kerosene, pipes, electricity).  Furthermore, the natural smells almost all occur when Montag is with Clarice, Faber, or the book people, where the artificial smells are present when the firemen are burning houses or when the Mechanical Hound is involved.

Of course, there are a few exceptions (and there's also the possibility that I missed some in my list).  Beatty's "smelling of the wind" doesn't really seem to fall into either category, but I think that's because he's something of an in-between character.  He has the knowledge that the books give, but he's not in favor of it.  My edition of the book includes an interview with Bradbury in which he explains that Beatty "was a book reader, but after various crises in his life - his mother died of cancer, his father committed suicide, his love affair fell apart - when he opened the books, they were empty.  They couldn't help him.  So he turned on the books and burned them."  Of course, that's going beyond the text of the book itself, but it does provide an explanation for Beatty's liminal olfactory nature.

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*Obviously, page numbers will differ by printing.  These page numbers are from Ballantine Books' 50th Anniversary Edition [ISBN: 0-345-34296-8].