(originally published Sept. 20, 2013)
A few years ago, as I was driving south down I-95 late one night, near the Pennsylvania-Delaware border, I saw a house on fire. The highway was mostly empty, and I slowed to look. Emergency responders were already on the scene, but they seemed on stand-by—the house looked like a total loss, and they were on-hand to keep the fire from spreading. It was eerily beautiful, the way the flames ate away the night. In my car, I could only imagine the intense heat, the smell of the cinders, the smoke of a person’s life in the air. When I drive by that area now, if I remember, I look to see if I can find where the fire had taken place, but I can never find it. Another house has already grown over that spot, I imagine, like scar tissue.
In The Hidden Fortress, revelers at a fire festival intone an existential prayer as they slouch their way around a bonfire.
The life of a man
Burn it with the fire
The life of an insect
Throw it in the fire
Ponder and you will see the world is dark
And this floating world is a dream
Burn with abandon
And at that last line, they dance in a frenzy. And as a fortune in gold is added to the fire, a princess and her bodyguard, who have been trying to evade capture with the gold, abandon their worries and dance. The two peasants who have been helping them, however, look at the fire with sadness and dismay—the gold they’ve tried to protect is now melting, and as the bonfire blazes, it burns away their hopes, their dreams, their futures.
I tell myself that if I ever suffer a catastrophic house fire, I won’t rebuild. The things that can be replaced, I won’t replace. The books, music, and movies that I’ve spent a lifetime collecting and curating, I will no longer need. If I’m ever reduced to zero, I’ll somehow make peace with zero. As 17th century poet Mizuta Masahide writes:
Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
of the rising moon.
Tonight, I returned home from a long day at work to find the house lit up with paper lanterns—the Harvest Moon Festival. I walked in to see, in our dusky living room, warm, glowing colors, floating in space. Each lantern a constellation, a nebuIa, a galaxy. I hesitated: Is this my house? Yes, it was. Matthew had used up the last of the tealights, including the red ones that smell faintly of bayberry. Dinner was warm on the stove. Afterwards, as we prepared to retire upstairs, Matthew said, Oh, the lanterns! and even though there was no risk of them catching on fire and burning the house down, we went back to blow them out. And from the second floor of the house, in the room we call the library, where I keep my autographed books and my Criterion Collection DVDs, we got a better view of the rising moon.