The bonfire next time

The word "bonfire," as we all know, literally comes from the French for "good fire." I can state this with the confidence of a person who took Spanish for four years in high school. "Bon" is one of those French words or phrases that all of us Spanish students know, like "adieu," "au revoir" and "une autre bouteille d'Andre pour la mademoiselle, s'il vous plait."

So when Princeton beat Yale on Nov. 11, what were we to expect but a good fire? News of the first bonfire in 12 years raged through the campus like ... well, like wildfire. The event was the only topic of conversation on campus hotter than ... well, fire. As the days whittled down and the bonfire grew nearer, the anticipation grew and grew, and we students burned for the celebration, burned like ... look, the point is, people were excited for the bonfire and several fire metaphors could be used to describe the level of anticipation. Surely, we thought, this would be the bon-nest fire of all time.

General consensus, however, says that it was less of a bonfire and more of a meh-it-was-OK-fire. Don't get me wrong: A bonfire is much better than a non-fire. But when I watched that pyre burn on Friday night, I knew I was seeing something important but not great. It's that feeling we all got watching the final episode of "Seinfeld." The Harvard game was "The Contest," the Yale game was "The Soup Nazi" and then the bonfire lacked a compelling storyline and featured egregious overacting by Michael Richards.

One of the problems was that the bonfire started not with a bang but with a whimper. As the flames went on their maddeningly slow crawl up toward the outhouse like a bent-back 95-year-old ascending the staircase after four o'clock applesauce dinner, the crowd got restless. I heard one student yell out in drunken frustration that someone should throw a grenade onto the fire. Granted, that one student was me, but it's a valid criticism, nonetheless.

Maybe it was all the hype. Maybe we all expected some sort of fireball, Jeff Terrell '07 wielding a flamethrower, a fire so high that birds in the sky would look down and ask, "What in God's name is that?" just as their talons burned off. And the fire did get pretty big, but by then it was too late. It's like the novel with 300 pages of mind-numbing boredom followed by a somewhat satisfying ending: At its core, the bonfire was every Jane Austen novel ever written.

So where do I place the ultimate blame for the letdown of the bonfire? On the excessive hype leading up to it, on a sensibility numbed by the modern mass media,? No, I'm going to take the Foley defense and place the blame on the time during my childhood when I was touched inappropriately by my preacher. Shocking, I know. Shocking not only because it has absolutely nothing to do with why I was disappointed by the bonfire, but shocking even more so because I am, in fact, Jewish, and have never met a preacher in my entire life. What were we talking about?

What was really missing from the bonfire was a sense of danger. Princeton's greatest traditions come with a pervading danger that makes them exciting. With stealing the clapper came the danger of what is now all too obvious; with the Nude Olympics came a more self-conscious danger, of being judged and of succumbing to shrinkage, and with Reunions, perhaps Princeton's greatest tradition, comes the awful danger of mistakenly hooking up with a 35-year-old. All of this danger made or makes these traditions consistently interesting, unpredictable and, pardon the pun, climactic.

But where was the danger on Friday night? At six in the evening, when Early Bird dinner specials had just ended, with the Princeton Fire Department watching from the sidelines and with a structure that could never have malfunctioned, Danger must have missed the Study Bus back from Yale. Perhaps we should have combined the danger of three of our traditions — Clapper, Nude Olympics, Reunions — into the bonfire, forcing a naked freshman to make a desperate fire climb up to the outhouse, at which point he would have had to make out with a member of the Class of '89. Whatever the answer is — and that almost certainly isn't it — something needs to be done between now and next year, when we win the Big Three championship again, to ensure that our good fire is once again just that and more. Jason O. Gilbert is a sophomore from Marietta, Ga. He can be reached at jogilber@princeton.edu.