prologue – on fire, and the giving of it

Of all the things a person can possess, fire is the strangest, because it is the only one that is not diminished by being given away. Hand someone bread and you have less bread. Hand them money, land, a seat at the table, and your own share shrinks by exactly what you gave. But touch your flame to the cold wick of another and nothing is taken from you; you stand there with your fire entire, and now there are two, and the dark has lost a little ground. You can light a thousand candles this way and walk home no poorer than you came. It is the one possession that multiplies in the act of being shared, and for that reason it has always seemed to me less a thing than a kind of argument — a small, burning proof that not everything worth having obeys the logic of scarcity.

There is only one other thing I know of that behaves this way, and it is knowledge. What I teach you, I do not thereby forget. The idea I hand across does not leave my own mind any lighter; if anything it burns brighter for having been spoken aloud, for having caught somewhere new. A thought shared is a thought doubled. And yet — and this is the part that has always troubled me — we have built a world that treats knowledge as though it were bread and not fire: something to be measured out, fenced off, kept behind a price, rationed to those who can afford the cost of entry. We hoard the one thing in all of existence that was made to be passed from hand to hand. We put the flame under lock, and then we are surprised that so many people are cold.

I am getting ahead of myself. Let me say plainly what this is, and what it is not.

This is, on its surface, a book of essays written for the GAMSAT — the examination that stands between a great many people and the medicine they hope one day to practise. If you are one of those people, stretched thin and short of sleep, trying to learn how to think and write with a clock running against you, then yes, this was written with you in mind, and I hope it serves you well. But the exam was only ever the doorway; it was never the room. These essays are not really about the GAMSAT, any more than a meal is about the plate it arrives on. They are about the oldest and largest things we have — grief and desire, memory and mortality, what we inherit and what we owe one another — caught, where I could manage it, in small and ordinary human moments. And those things belong to no examination and to no profession. They belong to everyone. So if you have never sat a test in your life and never intend to, if you simply found your way here with a restless mind and an appetite to think — then pull up a chair. You are as welcome at this fire as anyone, and there is room.

I want to be careful here, because there is a particular kind of author I have no wish to be: the one who arrives with a book under his arm and the quiet implication that he has worked something out the rest of us have missed. I have worked nothing out. I do not offer these essays as wisdom, or as answers, or as anything remotely finished. I offer them as kindling — as a handful of thoughts I have chased down some strange and unlit alleys, set here in the hope that they might catch in a mind that is not my own and become something I could never have predicted. I would far rather you argue with me than agree with me. The point of any of this was never that you should arrive where I arrived. It was that the spark might jump — that some line might lodge in you and start a small fire of your own, and that the fire would be yours, and go somewhere I cannot follow.

Which brings me to the decision that, more than any other, this book was built around: it is free, and it will stay free, to anyone who wants it.

I should explain that, because it is not nothing to me. My last book, a collection much like this one, found more readers than I had any right to expect, and I am grateful for every one of them. But it carried a price, and over time that price began to sit wrong with me in a way I could not at first put my finger on. Eventually I understood it. The whole of what I have ever wanted to say — across that book and this one and everything in between — is that the life of the mind is among the few things genuinely worth pursuing for its own sake; that to think and to understand are ends and not means; that knowledge is fire and not bread. And to fix a price to that is to contradict it in the very breath you preach it. It is to stand at the mouth of the cave holding the only flame and ask the cold for their coin before they may warm their hands. I could not keep doing it and still believe what I was saying.

There is a harder edge to this, too, and I will not pretend otherwise. The world this book comes from is not a gentle one. The industry that has grown up around examinations like the GAMSAT has learned, with no small sophistication, to sell hope by the hour — to put a price on a fear it is often glad to help manufacture, to charge the desperate handsomely for the privilege of their own anxiety. I understand the economics of it; I do not entirely condemn the people caught up in them. But I did not want to add one more price to that machine, however fair, and still call myself a friend to the people feeding it. Giving this away was the only answer I had that did not feel like a quiet betrayal of the thing itself.

The name, then. I called this book Prometheus, and I did so with some hesitation, because it is a heavy name and I am wary of large costumes. In the old story, Prometheus was the one who stole fire from gods who meant to keep it for themselves, and carried it down to the people shivering in the dark — and was punished without end for the theft, chained to a rock where the same wound was opened in him each morning, for the crime of giving away what the powerful had wanted kept scarce. We tend to tell it as a tragedy. I have always read it as something closer to defiance: the conviction, paid for dearly, that what the few have caged, the many were meant to hold. I make no comparison between myself and a titan — let me be clear about that; the parallel ends a long way short of me. I took the name only for the spirit of the thing: the small, stubborn act of taking something that has been locked up and priced, and handing it over freely, and lighting a fire that others can gather around. Not the fire that burns a thing down. The kind you sit beside. The kind that lets you finally see one another, and begins, almost of its own accord, the long and patient warmth of a real conversation.

A word about who is saying all this, though it matters less than the rest. I have loved writing for as long as I have been able to do it. I published my first novel at fourteen — a fact I offer with rather more affection than pride, since it was, by any honest measure, exactly the work of a fourteen-year-old — and I have not stopped since, through all the years and all the changes that have come between that boy and the man writing this now. I write because it is how I think; because it is how I have always tried to reach across the gap that separates any one mind from another. This book is not a product. It is only the latest in a lifetime of attempts to do that single thing, and to do it, this time, for as many people as will have it.

So here is the fire. I am holding it out to you with both hands. Take from it whatever is useful and leave the rest; disagree where you must, and please, do so loudly; let any of it that catches become your own, and carry it wherever it is you are going. And when you have finished — if some small flame is burning in you that was not there before — do the one thing fire was always for. Find someone in the dark, and pass it on.

Turn the page. We have a great deal to talk about.