A friend wrote to Neville describing an evening the week before, when he went home, lit a fire in the fireplace, and stretched out on the floor to listen to one of Neville's lecture tapes. Warmed by the fire, and having just dined, he fell sound asleep before the tape finished playing and never heard it. Neville uses the friend's fireplace as an illustration of how something as ordinary as fire can become a poetic symbol for life itself once you learn to see it that way.