What were they trying to do?

What were they trying to do? Montag and Mildred spend the day reading through the books, but none of what they read made any sense. Mildred begged Guy to destroy the books because it is very dangerous to have them. Guy knows that they can lose their home and be locked away in an insane asylum if they're caught. Montag won't give up, though. As they read, Montag hers the Mechanical Hound that he's certain has been programmed to hunt him sniffing outside his door. In this section the "Sieve and the Sand" refers specifically and literally to a passage where Montag had remembered a loathsome memory from his childhood. In the incident from his childhood, a cousin challenged Guy Montag to fill a sieve with sand in exchange for a dime. Of course, the more sand that Montag put into the sieve the more sand fell through the holes in the sieve. This frustrated Guy and it caused him to cry. Symbolically, the sieve represents Montag's desire to books and knowledge into his brain but as he reads the word in the book just can’t be remembered. At this point he was on the subway trying to read a passage from the bible, but the noisy commercials on the subway, and all of the busy distractions of his society made it nearly impossible to concentrate. He was skimming words super-fast and trying to absorb them before he had to give the book back to Beatty the next day. The jingle from the advertisement for Denham's Dentrifice that kept playing while Montag is on the train is interfering and the words to Ecclesiastes fall through his memory just like the sand went through the sieve all those years ago. Just as he was as a child, Guy Montag is frustrated at his inability to hang onto the words he's trying to memorize. Guy's modern world counts on this inability to concentrate. This world he lives in without books has encouraged people to live for the immediate moment; it's a world of sound bites and expediency. By filling every place with mindless