An Irishman's Diary

EATING IN an Asian restaurant one night recently, I was surprised by the sight - rare these days - of an open fire. It was bitterly cold outside, whereas the restaurant was warm and cosy. But sadly, this latter fact was due exclusively to central heating. The fire was only a video, playing in a loop on a large wall-mounted TV screen.

I suppose it was a joke, if not an original one. As I discovered since, you can download the fireplace from YouTube; in a short or long version, depending on your post-modernist heating needs.

Such videos are, arguably, a logical development. In most homes, televisions have long usurped fireplaces as the focus of life on winter nights. Where families once sat around the hearth, now they gather around the 32-inch flat-screen. Similarly, the brass poker has been replaced by the remote control, with which the modern father pokes the TV from time to time to coax a bit more warmth out of it.

The rise of television had barely begun when George Orwell wrote his essay, "The Case for the Open Fire", in December 1945. But even then, the hearth was under threat. Looking ahead to post-war rebuilding, Orwell bemoaned the likelihood that functionalist planners would construct homes without fireplaces because these were considered dirty, inefficient, and outdated.

"I am not denying that coal fires have their drawbacks, especially in these days of dwindled newspapers," he wrote, with a twinkle in his eye. "Many a devout communist has been forced against all his principles to take in a capitalist paper merely because the Daily Worker is not large enough to light the fire with." On a more serious note, Orwell agreed with most of the criticisms about open fires, but suggested none of them mattered if one thought life was for living, rather than for avoiding trouble. "It is quite true that [a fire] is wasteful, messy and the cause of avoidable work; all the same things could be said [. . .] about a baby."

Readers who were concentrating at the time may have noticed that, in paragraph three above, I mentioned how fireplaces used to be the "focus" of domestic life. Maybe this seemed a casual choice of expression. On the contrary, it was deliberate: because our modern word "focus" - so beloved of football managers and marketing consultants - derives from the Latin for "hearth".

Countless armies have marched to war on the slogan "Pro Aris et Focis": loosely translated as "For God and Country", but literally: "For our Altars and our Hearths." So whenever your boss or coach urges you to keep your focus, remember that s/he is in fact echoing the ancient Roman exhortation to "Fight for your Hearths".

The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne cited the slogan in his essay, "Fire Worship". A hundred years before Orwell, he was lamenting the widespread replacement of the open fire in US homes with the "cheerless and ungenial stove". In the event of the country being invaded, he wondered what rallying cry would rouse the nation's men.

"FIGHT FOR YOUR STOVES? Not I, in faith. If, in such a cause, I strike a blow, it shall be on the invader's part; and Heaven grant that it may shatter the abomination [. . .]!" Hawthorne had himself conspired in the abomination's rise, installing stoves in every room of his house. And he was clearly racked by guilt. Throughout his essay, he eulogises fire in personal terms as an "ancient friend" - warm, passionate, capable of extraordinary power and destructiveness, yet gentle enough to sit in a grate all evening, warming people, while also engaged in everything from drying their clothes to toasting chestnuts.

And what thanks had fire got? "Alas! blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him cheery and mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron prison, and compel him to smoulder away his life on a daily pittance which once would have been too scanty for his breakfast!"

Unhinged as Hawthorne may have been by his guilty conscience, the anthropomorphism was apt. Even today, supply guests at your Christmas party with an open fire and you will find it the most charismatic figure in the room. People young and old will hover around it all night, hanging on its every line, even though they've heard them all before. Somehow fire's wit is always new, its turn of phrase fresh and unpredictable. And of course, behind the playfulness, it has that element of danger that many women find irresistible. Yet a fire is arguably at its best as it begins to die, when it takes on a mellow quality and transmits this to any remaining humans gathered around, who will then have cast off their shoes (at least) and be curled up before it, probably making love to each other.

Hawthorne went so far as to suggest that hearths had a stabilising effect on society. Though an agent of change, fire was also "the great conservative" of Nature. "While a man was true to the fireside," he wrote, "so long would he be true to country and law - to the God whom his fathers worshipped - to the wife of his youth - and to all things else which instinct or religion have taught us to consider sacred." Perhaps he was exaggerating a little. But it's probably as well that Hawthorn did not live to see the video fireplace. And if there was any truth in his argument, it's little wonder the world that produced such a thing is in the shape it is.