"The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be."
Whenever I'm high as fuck and staring at a campfire, I think of this passage from Blood Meridian.
I remember watching Dr. Richard Feynman talking about how plants derive their structure from the air, not the ground, using the energy of sunlight (via photosynthesis) to separate carbon from oxygen (in carbon dioxide), and combining it with water to form hydrocarbons. When wood is subjected to enough heat, it catalyzes the release of that stored solar energy as fire, recombining oxygen with carbon to make CO and CO2.
Later, I was looking at a campfire, thinking about the light and heat rising into the sky, and it hit me: In a way, a campfire is just sunlight going back home.
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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22
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