Years ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Elise and I were very close to a German couple. Fellow doctoral students. Wonderful people. Radicals, like us. However, at some point we learned about a funny passion of theirs: they would regularly jump into their car and dash to the place where there was a big fire whenever they would spot one from their perch on top of a tall dormitory building. They loved to watch the spectacle from close up, and they were hardly bashful about this habit of theirs. I remember trying to understand them, trying to accept their nonchalant arguments, but I also remember never really succeeding. I just could not imagine myself piling into a car with my wife and rushing to the nearest blaze. It took this tiny incongruity, this grating bit of discord, some twenty-five years to surface to my consciousness.