Burning Man

Let’s face it: Our grand outdoor grills and château-inspired fireplaces are only excuses to indulge the pyromaniac who dwells in all of us.

- Dwight Garner

THERE’S AN ANCIENT COLD-WEATHER social tradition that declares: Never poke a fire in a friend’s house unless your friendship goes back at least seven years. “Fire is a thing sacred to the members of the household in which it burns,” the essayist Max Beerbohm wrote in regard to the seven-year rule. Tinker with a man’s fire, in other words, and you are tinkering with his spiritual sanity.

Reading Beerbohm, I had to wince. If there’s a live fire within 300 yards of where I am, indoors or out, I’ll find it immediately, the way Johnny Manziel sniffs out nightclub VIP rooms. I’ll loiter around the flames for an hour or so, beer in hand, singeing the knees of my trousers and fighting the urge to pick up smoking again. I’ll begin to talk about how the fire’s looking to whoever is around, because after horse racing, fire punditry is the finest punditry. Then I’ll do it: I’ll poke the fire. I’ll make a small, canny adjustment to a core log. I’ve known the host for seven weeks, not seven years. I’ll again have to admit to myself,as if I were in a church-basement AA (Arsonists Anonymous?) meeting: My name is Dwight Garner, and I am a pyromaniac.

We’re all pyros at heart. Our interest in fire is primordial, a vestige of the oldest human practices. It’s a vestige, too, of being eight years old and stealing matches to light trash fires in vacant lots. The word fire summons up our best qualities: courage, faith, passion, loyalty, intellect. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels, you always know who’s alive and who’s sleepwalking because of the fire the writer does or doesn’t find in the characters’ eyes. A primary drawback of painful emails is that, unlike with painful letters, you cannot tip a lit match toward their corners.