On Fire
Up before dawn this morning staring at this screen, which I’ve done all too often of late. I think about the legions of writers before me, also up early plying their trade. Down through the centuries they go, scribbling by fireside and candle flame and lamp light.
And then you have us modern folk. Our tablets are illuminated. Our laptops gleam. We need no lighting source save the one upon which we type.
There’s a lovely scene in the most recent film version of “Little Women” where Jo writes in the attic of her home in Concord. She has just lost her dear sister Beth, for whom she began writing tales of their girlhood, and now it has dawned on her that these stories, humble and homespun as they originally seemed, are the real thing, the stories she’s meant to tell.
She writes in soft candlelight, dipping her pen in and out of the ink. She wears her old writing jacket and scratches out the words as if in a trance. Days pass. The manuscript pages pile up, and she moves them around on the attic floor.
She writes in light and in darkness. When she strikes a match it sounds as if she’s setting the house on fire. But it’s she who’s on fire, penning the words that even after all these years I can still quote from memory: “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”
And here I sit, as the day lightens around me, as the screen glows.
(Saoirse Ronan as Jo in a still shot of “Little Women,” 2019, directed by Greta Gerwig, Sony Pictures Entertainment)
