One part of Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine that I really like talks about the increasingly frequent prohibitions on lighting fire in the fireplace of one’s own house. This was done in many parts of Canada, for example, and in Ireland where Kingsnorth lives. Kingsnorth is a lifelong conservationist and even a former Green. But he realizes that these prohibitions are not about nature.
The hearthstone has deep connotations in every European culture. Everybody knows the expression “heart and hearth” or its equivalent in their own European language. Our civilization arose from our capacity to survive and thrive in cold weather. The fireplace, thus, had a cosmological significance across time for Europeans, Kingsnorth explains. It symbolizes the warmth of the household. Somebody needs to stay at home and keep the fire going for those who go out into the cold. “She who guards the hearth” is how Ukrainians refer to a woman*. We say that a woman is the heart of the family because a child’s heart begins to beat under her own.
There’s a lot more to it though. Remember how we talked about focus? We are all in a battle against the technology that tries to destroy our focus, disperse our attention, and steal our capacity to create. Do you know what focus means in the Latin original?
It means fireplace.
If you’ve ever stared into a fireplace, you know why. In our shared European past, the hearth was a point of convergence, a place where the family gathered for warmth, companionship, and stories. We can gather around a fireplace. Or we can stare at individual screens that prevent us from focusing on our own thoughts.
“Lose your fires, and you lose your focus as a culture,” Kingsnorth says.
Thousands of years of cultural memory come alive for a descendant of Europeans who gathers firewood, chops it up, brings it home, and starts the fire. The fragrant smoke, the crackling logs, the jumping flames — all of it awakens the memory of the chain of generations before us that made, smelled, and saw the same fire. You can’t substitute for that with an electric fireplace.
This is what’s being taken from us. Our hearth, our home, our cultural memory. We are being deracinated and de-cultured.
*We say it with one word. Its the translation that’s clunky, not the original.
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