This Ember
The fire within us (335/365)
We humans love the idea of fire, even knowing firsthand its destructive power. Fire burns and ravages and kills us, but it also heals, illuminates, and warms us.
Fire is central in our understanding of what it means to be human, as laid out in the Prometheus story, one of the most culturally relevant Greek myths.
Prometheus defied Zeus by stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans, enabling technology, craftsmanship, and civilization. This directly challenged Zeus’s authority and upset the intended order between gods and mortals.
For that, Prometheus is eternally punished by Zeus… until it is later ended by Heracles/Hercules, who kills the eagle and frees him with Zeus’s permission. Thanks Disney!
Fire is also a metaphor for what makes us human—hope, goodness, moral integrity—as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road.
The main character, a dying father who survived the apocalyptic event that serves as the book’s backstory, tells his son that he has to carry the fire, even after his death.
The son answers:
I don’t know how to.
Yes, you do.
Is the fire real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I don’t know where it is.
Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.
Fire is also used as a metaphor for persistence, discipline, and grit—the fire to continue, to keep going and never give up.
As the year ends, I can still feel the embers of that commitment I made to myself eleven months ago.
They’re not a blazing fire anymore, but they’re still warming me.
#day335
Thirty days to go!
I'm a big Cormac McCarthy fan, so I really appreciated you linking the innate human pyromania with The Road.
Coincidentally I just read today the following by Cicero (On Old Age): comparing human life with a burning fire: "The death of young men seems to me like putting out a great fire with a deluge of water; but old men die like a fire going out because it has burnt down of its own nature without artificial means."
What can one say about fire? It is an ungraspable light and warmth that you can stare at for hours and sit quietly beside it, or it can become an unquenchable killing machine. I see why the human life (soul?) is compared to it.
Btw not to mention Pentecost, etc.