The Crackle of the Fire

Just semi-intelligent creatures in the dark

Something interesting has been happening in my brain while I’ve been reading lately.

Okay, that’s an inane statment.

Reading is an overload of interesting things happening in your brain. Your eyes are processing figures on a page or screen into sounds that form words to which we have assigned meaning, your synapses are firing, causing a sentence describing the smell of a shampoo to trigger that same smell somewhere in the folds of your brain. A movie is playing in your head based on just words—and when we think about how inefficient human communication is (how often we don’t know what the hell we’re saying to each other)—it is nothing short of a miracle that one person sitting at a computer can effectively tell a story to someone else laying in bed months or years later.

Lately, this miracle of reading has been more at the forefront of my mind while I’m reading. I think about how human beings are inherently story-telling creatures, and I marvel at the fact that we still seek stories out so hungrily.

The way we consume stories these days is surrounded by so much noise. Books that were recommended on social media and which we’re reading because they were picked by a celebrity for their book club. Books that receive buzz, books that are being adapted into film, films we’re watching because they got Oscar nominations, or because they’re on one of our seventeen streaming services and it’s just so easy to press play.

Stories are so readily available that we can have the TV playing 24/7, we can find almost any book we want at a moment’s notice. We have podcasts telling us stories, audiobooks, those too-long preambles on every single recipe online telling us how this quinoa bowl is inspired by the blogger’s recent trip to Peru.

One of the most miraculous aspects of stories is that we are such willing participants, technology and all the trappings of modern-life be damned. We suspend our disbelief, not just in the perhaps-stretched-truth details of a story (looking at you in particular, action films and Christmas rom-coms), but in the very fact that we are being told a story. We flip the pages of the book, hit play on the movie, and our brains follow the events and the characters without constantly thinking about the fact that it’s a story. About the mechanics of it all. About how it took a person sitting at a computer (or with a notebook, or if they’re particularly affectatious, a typewriter hauled into the coffeeshop) for months and months until this story existed as the worst version of itself. Then came revisions, both self-appointed and from an editor, maybe from friends, too, from an agent. The story was emailed dozens of times, sent to people collaborating on the story and those trying to sell the story. It was sent to a design team to come up with a cover, it became a product, became something to be distributed until it arrived in our hands or in our ears or projected at our eyeballs.

And yet at the core, through it all, these books and shows and films and podcasts we consume are just stories. The kind we’ve been craving since we had language. A parent before bedtime. A teacher in class. That’s all it is. Someone saying, “This happened, then this” in a way that makes us care.

I can picture everything else falling away and being left just with the crackle of a fire. Rather than laying in bed with a headlamp on, I could easily be sitting on the ground near feeling the warmth of the flames. I picture a cave sometimes, though that feels cartoonish, and not entirely accurate. How long were we cave dwellers? Did we have language when we were? Stories? Who knows. (One of you does, I’m sure).

Maybe it’d be more realistic to picture myself in the open air, under the stars, swatting away bugs that are lured in by the light of the flame. Or a rustic cabin somewhere, no electricity, no Netflix, no phones nearby pinging with distractions. Which, if we want to be realistic in the picture we’re painting here, probably means the lack of running water. A constant presence of terrible smells. The inability to disinfect, and therefore rampant infections and disease, which we can’t treat.

But we don’t have to take it there.

We can keep it romantic. The village storyteller in front of us, no worthy distractions. An adventure, voices for each character, well-rehearsed pauses to increase the tension. The crackle of the fire adding ambiance. A story about how the world was borne, about the gods, about how the mountains came to be, about love. It hardly matters what the story is about. We are drawn to the story itself. We are warmed by it, sip it down like brandy (do we have brandy in the cave? Something close enough, surely).

We are still just semi-intelligent creatures in the dark, gathered around a slight light, being told stories to try to make sense of this world we’re in.

I know it’s not always like this. Not even for me, though stories are my career, my passion, my income, my distraction from all the distractions. Sometimes we are just reading to quiet our brains for five minutes before bed. Just reading so we can go to the book club with our friends and not totally embarrass ourselves. Reading while our minds are drifting to more mundane and grounded thoughts. Listening to an audiobook while chopping vegetables, watching a TV show in the background while working. Sometimes we consume stories the way we eat a sandwich in the car, more for sustenance than true nourishment.

But, when I’m in the right headspace and I hear the crackle of the fire, my sense of wonder while reading, my enjoyment of movies grows. It helps, for some reason, to see past the packaging to the act itself. To peak behind the curtains, just for a moment. To be aware of the spell I’m falling for, and still let myself fall.