Many Faces of Fire
Fire has many faces, and they all serve to remind us how fire can be helpful and beautiful, but also potentially dangerous and destructive. Our everyday familiarity with this enchanting element might sometimes make us forget exactly what we’re playing with.
In 1665-1666 London, thousands of people were dying from Europe’s serial villain: the bubonic plague, eliminating roughly one-quarter of the city’s population. When the sickness began, those who could, fled, but many were stranded inside the walls of the eerily quiet city, praying for a reprieve from the deadly disease. On the night of September 2, 1666, the reprieve came.
A fire began in a baker’s shop on Pudding Lane and quickly spread through the city’s wooden houses, markets, and churches, leaving ash and melted lead in its tracks. The plague-ridden slums ignited and fell before the fire’s raging flames. Five days later, London’s population emerged from the ashes to find over a third of the city destroyed. Along with the houses, markets, and churches, though, the fire put an end to the plague’s progress. Nothing cleanses quite like fire.
Fire tempers steel and cuts through metals. It’s what brings us together for campfire stories, smores, and beach bonfires. Fire describes our creativity, trouble, fever, and inspiration. It provides warmth, light, and a romantic ambiance. It brings us together for hot meals and for fellowship. It can also bring destruction and devastation if uncontrolled.
Our job at White Glove Chimney Sweeps is to keep it under control. A good referral is a person who has forgotten what fire is, someone who has become complacent and underestimates the power of fire’s many faces.
G. K. Chesterton: “A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists only to warm people. It exists also to light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man’s house and hearth, for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.”