For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
A few days ago, smoke from California’s Park Fire drifted over my current home base in Salt Lake City, Utah. I couldn’t help but notice the sunrise that morning. The light appeared a vivid reddish orange when filtered through the wildfire smoke. As the sun inched above the colossal bulk of the Wasatch Front, it illuminated the billowing clouds of dust and ash choking Downtown. It’s easy to find oneself at a loss for words when confronted with the sublime. It struck me as strange that a harbinger of our coming demise should be so picturesque.
A few weeks ago, as my friends and I returned from Nevada, I actually saw one burning the slopes of Ensign Peak. The authorities extinguished it quickly, but the plume of smoke from even that comparatively tiny fire was visible to us from the highway at least thirty miles away.
A year and a half ago, while I was visiting my family in Virginia, wildfire smog from Canada blanketed the entire East Coast. My sister suffered an asthma attack severe enough that she needed to borrow a friend’s inhaler. The sunrises and sunsets were beautiful then, too.
As a nicotine addict, smoke in my vicinity doesn’t usually faze me that much to begin with, and compared with the tragic fates that befell residents of Paradise, California, or Lytton, British Columbia, my experiences are trifling at best. Unfortunately, though, I also happen to be addicted to the news, which means that articles about forests ablaze are never far from my fingertips. Even as I write this, the Greek capital of Athens struggles to contain a wildfire in its suburbs.
The world’s temperate forests have always burned, but there’s something different about the fires now. This has become our daily, lived reality. It’s banal, like an extrajudicial execution or an act of genocide. We’re expected to act like this is normal because if the hoi polloi begin to question the status quo, we might notice that something is amiss. God help the global elite should that ever come to pass.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus believed the arche, the irreducible constituent substance of all reality, to be fire. Physicists today have abandoned his line of thinking, obviously, but Heraclitus’ beliefs nevertheless testify that humanity’s obsession with fire has deep antiquity. One could argue that the ability to set and control fire helps distinguish more advanced hominins from the rest of the biosphere. In that vein, perhaps fire has bewitched humanity since long before we arrogantly labeled ourselves wise.
This blog will consist of a series of meditations on what it means to exist in a world on fire in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the phrase. It feels as if everything is coming apart at the seams — perhaps in writing about it, I can help myself, and hopefully others, feel slightly more sane.
proletarian grammarian 