DRMacIver's Notebook
The Candle Exercise
The Candle Exercise
I did an A LevelThe last two years of school before university in the UK. in Chemistry. I mostly disliked it.
There were however a couple things I liked that occurred in it. I think they were all despite the curriculum rather than because of it - one of my chemistry teachers was pretty good, and she set us a bunch of work that was off curriculum (and largely I think about teaching us a more general scientific attitude than chemistry itself).
One thing was that quite early on she set us an exercise in observational writing which stuck with me. The exercise is this: Take a candle, light it, and then write down everything you can observe about it.
What you will quickly find is that you can observe quite a lot. I don’t have a candle with me right now, but here’s a picture of one (from wikimedia commons):
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I won’t do the exercise in full but, for example, notice how the candle flame has quite a complex structure. It’s more transparent around the wick and becomes yellow as you move up. You can also notice that only the tip of the wick glows.
You can try to generate hypotheses about why these things are happening, and it can be enlightening to do so, but importantly that’s not part of the exercise. You’re here to observe. Write down everything you see, with as little interpretation as possible.
What you find is that there is an awful lot to observe about a candle. Even just looking at it, a candle has a lot of detail. Some of it general to candles, some specific to the one you’re looking at. e.g. where does wax run down the side? What’s the structure of the lip near there and far away from it?
You can also use your other senses. Touch it!You probably shouldn’t touch the flame, but it might be informative to put your hand near it. Where is the candle warm? How does heat conduct through the wax? You can also smell it (though if it’s a paraffin wax candle like most are it probably won’t smell like much). You can listen to it - what does a burning candle sound like?
You can also interact with it. What happens when you tip the candle? What happens if you blow on it briefly? What do you observe if you blow it out? And then relight it?
For my chemistry class I only wrote a page or two, but I think you’d find you can probably easily write 10,000 words or more about a single candle.
Anyway, it’s a very interesting exercise that as you can see has stuck with me for a very long time. It’s a very good and immediate way of experiencing the fact that reality has a surprising amount of detail.
This isn’t super specific to candles. Any object will do, but a candle is particularly good for it with its range of sensory experiences and the fact that it’s an actual dynamic object doing something.
I’m thinking about this as a follow on to my recent thoughts about noticing interesting things about your life of course. If there’s this much interesting detail to notice about a candle, surely an entire day has at least as much interesting detail?
It doesn’t always feel like it of course. It’s very common to get to the end of the day and go “What even happened today?”, particularly on days I end up spending drifting. If anything, drifting feels like a strategy to deliberately achieve that, and basically pretend the day isn’t happening. But even a drifty day has a lot in it, you just may not like what’s there.
There was an exercise I was doing from Making Magic that I committed to doing for thirty days and then… didn’t.This happens a lot. - I probably only managed about 8 - which is that each morning you try to journal about what happened the previous day. I think this would be a good exercise for me to revisit, but with a focus on trying to identify small numbers of things to write about in detail rather than trying to provide a full account of the day like I did previously. The goal isn’t to remember everything, but to identify things worth remembering.