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@ Anthony DiFiglio
2025-06-03 14:45:31If you touch the tip of my finger and feel no fire,\ you are already numb to the world.
I operate in the flames—like a steelworker at the blast furnace.\ The heat does not comfort me. It is not a Christmas fire.\ You cannot huddle around it. You cannot be warmed by it.
My fire burns within. It feeds on what you suppress.\ If you do not satiate the flames,\ those emotions will rise like smoke and suffocate your soul.
Do not meditate on what belongs in the fire—everything does.\ Every pinch of pain. Every shadow of shame. Every twitch of fear is\ **Fuel.
You are not the keeper of the fire. The fire keeps you.\ And if you resist its hunger, it is already eroding you.
A man without a furnace is not a man.\ He draws lukewarm baths and soaks in a lukewarm life.
There is no such thing as a man without deep red embers glowing inside him.\ There is no such thing.
After writing this piece, I kept thinking about this scene from the book Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Here’s a curated excerpt…
“The scream of an alarm siren shattered the space beyond the window and shot like a rocket in a long, thin line to the sky. It held for an instant, then fell, then went on in rising, falling spirals of sound, as if fighting for breath against terror to scream louder. It was the shriek of agony, the call for help, the voice of a wounded body crying to hold its soul…
There was no time to speak, to feel or to wonder.
He was aware of nothing else—except that the sum of it was the exultant feeling of action, of his own capacity, of his body’s precision, of its response to his will.
To the rhythm of his body, with the scorching heat on his face and the winter night on his shoulder blades, he was seeing suddenly that this was the simple essence of his universe: the instantaneous refusal to submit to disaster, the irresistible drive to fight it, the triumphant feeling of his own ability to win. He was certain that Francisco felt it, too, that he had been moved by the same impulse, that it was right to feel it, right for both of them to be what they were—he caught glimpses of a sweat-streaked face intent upon action, and it was the most joyous face he had ever seen.
When the job was done and the gap was closed, Rearden noticed that there was a twisting pain in the muscles of his arms and legs, that his body had no strength left to move—yet that he felt as if he were entering his office in the morning, eager for ten new problems to solve. He looked at Francisco and noticed for the first time that their clothes had black-ringed holes, that their hands were bleeding, that there was a patch of skin torn on Francisco’s temple and a red thread winding down his cheekbone. Francisco pushed the goggles back off his eyes and grinned at him: it was a smile of morning, he felt how glad he was to be alive.”