"There are other ways to look at it. You might say that as a body gets burnt, as it turns into wisps of smoke, the atoms of which a human is made get separated, wander off into the atmosphere, change form, and become rearranged so that they link up with other operations in the universe."

I'm living in a train carriage on the edge of the bush, on the verge of a bushfire season. Such circumstances elicit a lot of thoughts and stories about the nature of fire.