The house has been on fire ever since it was built. Maybe even while it was being built. It has become a tradition to think of the house in connection with flames, just like one cannot conceive a piano without keys or a shooting gun without bullets. Nobody questions the house anymore. Nobody questions the flames either.
But the fact is, fires have been increasing since the creation of the house. They are growing higher as I write these lines. Back in the old days, it was easy to see the flames through a TV screen, make a polite comment (“it’s a shame about those fires”), and then wash away the bitterness of thought with a sip of your Martini. But neutrality becomes a bit harder when the flames come and eat up part of your garden. And flames seem to have a special predilection for gardens.
Nevertheless, a lot of people stand the heat and the smoke just the same. Some of them simply learn to take extra precautions (there are a lot of guides available), others simply pretend that everything is just the way it was, when the fires were at a comfortable distance, and all the people dying were strangers. From time to time, some of these people get choked to death by the flames, a falling roof squashes them, or they get caught and burnt alive by two contrary lines of fire. But it comes to them as an infinite surprise, as if they had never thought of it as a logical consequence of the previous signs.
Or maybe they thought of it, but for some of them, the house was the only possibility, even if it meant the flames too, because they were too used to it to change.
Of course, there is always the mist, too. But the mist is perhaps even more scary, at least according to what you can see of it from the house’s windows: nothing, absolute nothing. The mist is pitch black, vast, gloomy. The residents who, protected with safety ropes, have made the experience of entering a few steps into it, tell strange stories about loosing your face and becoming as thin as air. They usually never repeat the experience: they stick to the house till the end of their days, often a terrible ending.
However, there is other people, urged by sadness, the lack of hope, or, more commonly, the simple impossibility to physically stand smoke and flames, who give the mist a try, and never come back. Typically, they seem to be convinced that there are more of them inside the blackness, whatever that means in a place where you no longer have a face, a body or a name. Whether they succeed or not, it is not possible for us to know. We still live in the house.
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Hi Nacho,
Many people I’ve met in my life do prefer the heat associated with the flames as a more comfortable situation and they just learn to live with the smoke; and many of them do a really good job at that.
Personally I would prefer the challenge of the mists, even knowing that there is no come back, just forward movement in the process of changes that inevitably will have to follow.
But the interesting thing is the natural division between people that, mostly based in their own fears and dreams, and the proportion each one of those they hold, would somehow naturally select themselves into one of the groups.
Very interesting post that gives homework to the reader
Raul
Hi, Raúl, I’m glad you liked the post. I like to tell a little story now and then, or rather, some of my metaphors extend into tiny stories, now and then
.
Being a story, I hope I don’t give the impression of setting two fixed groups, “them” and “us” (it reminds me of our previous discussion on “wolves” and “sheep”). I wrote this thing without a clear interpretation in mind: at first I thought of the mist as the new “virtual life” we have acquired in the latest decade or so; many people still rejects it as “fake”, “anonymous”, “substitute of the real thing”, but then, as I wrote, the analogy turned into something slightly different…
I think that “natural association” between people with the same affinities that you mention, is at the same time the greatness and the danger of Internet: if I were, say, obsessed with slashing my nipples with rusted cans (it’s an example), in 1970 I would have been desperate of solitude. Now I would have created a Facebook account and would have 6,000 daily visits -I have to google if it exists one of these days…
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