Our theme for the month of March is “light.”
“My mom took my grandma out for a drive today,” one of my friends said. It was a Tuesday evening, so we were sitting on my fifty-year-old couch, post-enchiladas, while a Japanese pop band sang about love over images of a fantasized version of historical China on the TV. “They went to drive by that house that burned down last night.”
Anime night is our weekly ritual. We rotate cooking, watch a couple episodes of a show, get caught up on the minutiae of our weeks. Usual subjects include what coworkers made our lives extra annoying in the past seven days, how close I’ve gotten to splurging on that Lego Rivendell set, whether or not Stray Kids has released their North American tour dates yet. (They haven’t.)
The comment about the drive was just one more throwaway anecdote, amusing in its juxtaposition of fiery destruction with the thought of our friend’s dignified grandmother. But none of us asked why—you understand intuitively why people are drawn to burned-out houses. Even grandmothers.
You likewise don’t need me to tell you about how compelling fire is. It’s the quality that requires all campfires be poked with a stick, that thing that forces the “ooo” and “ahh” when it’s mixed with elemental magic and shot a hundred feet in the air, the reason why you spent an April afternoon in an Ann Arbor noodle shop refreshing every news site that had anything to say about Notre Dame.
No one was injured in the fire my friend’s grandmother drove out to see the aftermath of. No one died in the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral. Maybe the lack of lives lost absolves us from our curiosity. It doesn’t exonerate the time I spent at my college summer desk job devouring any information I could about the Grenfell Tower. Or the long hours I’ve since spent on the New York Times website compulsively reading about illegal apartment dwellings in South Africa and Pakistani shopping malls and warehouse artist communes when I’m supposed to be there for the book review.
I flatter myself that being drawn to the specifics of suffering is a universal impulse. Universality doesn’t confer a moral judgment, of course. And I must wonder if I’m damned by the fact that my obsession rarely extends to wildfires.
On July 18, 2019, a disgruntled man with a history of mental illness set fire to Kyoto Animation’s Studio 1 building in Fushimi Ward of Kyoto, Japan. In order to ensure that the fire would spread quickly, he doused the building’s entrance and some of its employees with eleven gallons of gasoline. The flames and their toxic fumes killed thirty-six people and injured almost that many. Earlier this year, the man who lit the fire was sentenced to death.
July 18 is the best guess for the day the fire of Rome started. It’s also my birthday. You could try to find meaning in that. There is none, apart from the instinct to make ourselves a part of tragedy, which in itself is another attempt to find meaning in the ashes. There is none.
There’s only the burned-out house, the driveby, the Wikipedia page, the dead.

And yet the search for meaning continues.
It is of curious note that humans like to attach themselves to tragic things. Why tragedy has almost a stronger gravitational pull than more positive experiences. But perhaps that’s for another post.