Horizons Online Edition

Issue date: 3/10/08 Section: Final Approach

Jack London's 19th century tale, "To Build a Fire," portrays a character who commits a monumental mistake in his life. He kindles a camp flame in sub-zero weather directly beneath the snow-capped branches of a pine tree. As the flame grows larger, the heat rises higher and melts snow drops from the overhead branches and smothers his fire into a puff of smoke. Had the temperature not been 70 degrees below zero; had his dire need to acquire immediate warmth not become a matter of life and death- he could have easily built another fire. But his clothes were wet from the fall he endured through a thin layer of ice atop a small creek bed, and he suffered violently from an extreme case of frostbite that turned his hands to jelly. Even the simple act of lighting a match became an impossible task and the compulsory need for immediacy became the difference between living and dying.

Such a scenario reminds me: for the many events that occur daily in our lives we often create self-made mishaps and unknowingly build our fires beneath snow covered trees. Many times we have only one chance to redeem ourselves-from ourselves-and yet, like the old adage says, before we die, "we die a thousand deaths." Rather than create the warmth desperately needed for sustenance; rather than preserve the vital heat within, we often kindle our fires beneath snow-capped trees only to suffer the consequences.

The narrator in London's allegory suggests that wisdom is not begotten by experience alone but also through one's instinctive ability to recognize the significance behind simple events. The main character of "To Build a Fire" rejects the wise words of the old man who warns of traveling alone in weather so cold that, when one spits, one's saliva actually freezes before it touches the ground. Had the doomed frontiersman realized the vital significance of such an event, he would have evaded freezing to death. Unfortunately-after building his fire beneath the snow-capped tree-he did not receive the gift of reparation.

For me, the significance of London's text exists in its suggestion of the value of "common sense." The best preventative medicine-common sense-uncommon to most and oftentimes elusive as if it were some mysterious extra-sensory perception-is nothing more than sound, practical judgment affirming that we do not have to be soothsayers or practice palmistry and engage in horoscope readings in order to gain insight into ourselves. Rather, the health and survival of our well-being, and the visual and mental acumen needed to avoid any type of "death by freezing" exists in our ability to apply common sense to everyday life, to decode and to realize the importance of seemingly trivial, present-tense events that confront us daily. Ironically, our sense of sight is the primary monitor for invoking in each of us our individual sense of Truth; yet we know how deceptive appearances can be: to which adage, then, do we place our belief? "To see is to believe?" Or that we simply should "not believe everything we see?"

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