The War on Candles

My favorite local restaurant does something that I hate. On each table in their otherwise beautiful restaurant, in a small and delicate plastic blue tealight, there is an electric plastic candle. 

You know the kind. Perhaps you came across them because you were shopping in a Halloween store with your parents, looking for a good way to keep your jack o’ lantern lit. Or maybe you worked at a restaurant and had the job of lighting the candles, turning the button on each one, and bringing them to tables. That is how I came across them. 

That is not how I learned to hate them.

I hate them because when I am eating a delicious meal, and I pause to take a sip of a drink, likely a sour beer, I see in front of me fake-sparkling in fake-glass, plastic in plastic, and an electric flame probably powered by a small silver disc. And then, sipping my beer and my sparkling water, I ask, “If the candle is fake, might the ‘fresh bread’ be fake as well?” 

Real candles are, in fact, simpler and more beautiful. They do not pose any problem on first inspection. One might think a real flame is an issue, but I am more terrified of the idea that restaurants believe their patrons so infantile that they cannot risk a small open flame, which has been on every table for nearly ten thousand years. le

The flame is fragile. Wind or breath can blow the flame out. They require being lit and carried gently to the table or lit at the table early in the night. They require replacement, probably no more than plastic candles. The type of restaurants that use electric candles can generally afford to use real ones. 

The plastic candle haunts me. I sometimes worry that my fear of them, my stupid hate, is like that of the famed German philosopher, Teddy Adorno, who feared that the logic of fascism could be found in the slam of a car door. Or I am more like a contemporary, like the French reactionary writer, Renaud Camus, who wrote an entire book about how becoming a society of first names was a terrible crime against humanity. Shutting a car door, calling your boss by their first name instead of their last, if you were to believe these men, you could see both the holocaust and mass migration in each. If you were to believe me, you would be able to see a cheap shot in an office park in the plastic candle. You would be able to see our lazy world, our lazy times, our fear of the heat of a true flame, and the beauty of fire in glass. 

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, to honor the ride of Paul Revere, turned on two plastic candles. He posted this image on X, the propaganda website run by Elon Musk, a noted Ketamine addict and the world’s worst polygamist. Hegseth turned on the plastic candles to honor the ride of Paul Revere, posting, 

On April 18th, 1775, Paul Revere rode through the night to warn local militias that the British were coming. Two hundred and fifty years later, we honor his bravery.

Staring at the photo, I thought that, with the Pentagon’s budget, two beautiful handmade lanterns could be made and placed inside them, a set of candles made by an American crafter. Could you not then hang these lanterns outside the Pentagon or at a famous Church and perhaps get a more beautiful picture of Pete lighting them? Maybe even ask the Department of Education to teach American children about the importance of that historical ride through the night? Maybe you could then use those lanterns every year and make a tradition of it, selecting an American candlemaker every year to honor with the task of making the candles, or use the same ones for fifty years, letting them become old and yellow with beauty, letting the lantern glass become stained with black smoke? 

Instead, we received a highly edited photo of Pete holding one of two electric candles, set against an industrial background that could almost be any office in America. There is no nature in sight, none of the water that Paul Revere probably looked upon with terror and bated breath on his long midnight ride. There is no horse and rider, there is no Church raising lantern lights, but there is a set of plastic candles. I could recreate this photo with any man in any office building anywhere in the nation after a trip to any dollar store. 

With a real flame burning, I always feel some semblance of tradition. Even when the candle is named something absurd like Vanilla Cupcake, I feel that I am doing something solemn. There, you are performing a task that people have performed for 10,000 sacred years. You light the candle and think of birthdays and wakes and memorials, you think wow, fire in glass is actually beautiful. Even if the scent is Vanilla Cupcake.

The plastic candle, like the slam of the car door, like the society of first names, leads us to a war on meaning. Meaning is not deep or hard. Meaning is easy and simple. Meaning is the 30 Rock episode where Liz lights her sleeve on fire to avoid expressing her feelings, which I watched and laughed at with my sister, who no longer speaks to me. Or Bible lessons at the Church I no longer go to, of the virgin and the candles, of those who lasted the night, who kept the faith, and now I wonder when I see a candle burn if I should have kept it too. Meaning is going to the store at age twenty-three to purchase cheap white candles for your friend’s party, searching through a stack for the right number, lighting them for ten seconds, and blowing them out in a stranger’s backyard with strings of fairy lights from Amazon swaying above you, taking the place of stars. But that didn’t matter, because at least the fire was real. 

I cannot trust the plastic candle; it will never burn me, will never be remembered, will never become a tradition. The Halloween memories I cherish most are of turning off the lights in my house with my mom and dad to place a burning candle in a pumpkin. The moments before the candle went in, when it was dark and quiet, and my young hand trembled with the flame, when my dad whispered “careful,” so tenderly, are themselves a candle burning in the shapes behind my heart. I did not want to see a jack-o’-lantern; I wanted to see the flame flicker inside the darkness, in the shape we carved together, and know that in the darkness there was my father’s strong and able hand, hovering, to catch mine.

The plastic candle has no flickering. There are no mistakes, there is no reaction to the air, no chemical scent, no fragility, no tending at all required, and no need to be tender. The plastic candle does not make me tender; the plastic candle makes me an infant, letting me not be tender or careful. 

Have you ever been at a party, enjoying yourself and the music, and then, by some small and stupid act, you fall out of the music? You lose the vibe? You come crashing back to reality? You’re dancing one moment, and then the music stops - for half a second - and the trance doesn’t come back? Or at a bar, having a wonderful time, and then you suddenly find yourself confronted by the terrible fact that you are not funny, that you are not beautiful or handsome, that you are simply drunk, at a bar, with other drunk people, at a bar? That you are waiting on the bathroom, and the music feels parallel to you? Maybe you are not honoring the ride of Paul Revere? That you are alone, in an office high in the Pentagon, turning on a plastic candle for a photo few will see?  That maybe you are not eating a wonderful meal, with bread made in-house, kneaded with tough knuckles, but perhaps at a table, staring at a plastic candle, worried that fresh bread made in-house was bought next door? 

That maybe you are writing about your hate for the candle, doubting yourself. If the candle is not real, how can my hate be? Isn’t the car door just a car door, isn’t the first name easier? 

Fire in glass is actually beautiful... But I still go to the restaurant with plastic candles, because the food is good, the beer is fine, and after a drink, I'm not sure it matters anymore.

Cars: Adorno Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations... which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment. (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: reflections on a damaged life, 1951).

First names: Camus We inhabit the civilization of first names. In more and more types of our social rapport, not only of a private nature, the name, which was the name of the family, is being erased in favor of the first name alone. This would be a fundamental anthropological mutation, and a double regression: towards the infancy of individuals, for centuries the reserved domain of the first name; but also towards the pre-infantilism of societies, too primitive for the diverse forms of the social contract. Without a name, no contract is possible, in fact: no responsibility, because the name alone is capable of committing the subject and signing. The verticality of the lineages, of which the name is the guarantor, is replaced by the horizontality of a perpetual da capo (Like the first head of a family forever), the first name only ever beginning with the one who bears it - a manifestation of a fantasy of continuous self-generation, where we see the past, history and the very feeling of time, culture, nations and identities being lost to the benefit of an absolutist and horizonless present. (La Civilization Des Prenoms, Renaud Camus, 2018)