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our mastery over that inconstant flame.The extinction of fire from daily life
has encouraged an erasure of fire from social memory. Whether the future
will continue to honor fire as the founding art, as Prometheus proclaimed,
is unclear. It may choose to dismiss it as a mythic curiosity from an era that
sucked marrow out of charred bones, herded cattle to fresh-burned forage,
and sat contentedly around a flickering campfire instead of a big-speaker,
big-screen home entertainment center. It may prefer the virtual fire of
computers to the robust, and dangerous, half-tamed fire of nature.
NOTES
1. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (reprinted translation: Beacon,
1964).
2. Pliny, quoted in Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi, eds., The Pirotech-
nia of Vannoccio Biringuccio (reprint: MIT Press, 1966), xxvii.
3. Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
(reprint: Dover, 1972), 69, 55-57, 60, 63, 66.
4. Smith and Gnudi, eds., Pirotechnia, 336.
5. Percy Bugbee, “Foreword,” in Fire and the Air War, ed. H. Bond (National Fire
Protection Association, 1946).
6. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. 2 (London, 1934 edition), 459.
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