I recently asked some friends what they would grab from their houses if it was on fire and they had only three minutes to escape. This question has intrigued me for some time. I can’t remember when I first thought of it—or maybe it was put to me at a dinner party by a host desperate to get things rolling. Regardless, I am curious about what people find important, and this question speaks directly to the issue. It is, too, I confess, a self-serving question, as I am trying to figure out what is important to me and am hoping someone will help me down that path. Anyway, my friends on this afternoon answered typically. Of the four, three said they would grab the family photographs. The holdout said he’d reach for his guitar. Guitars aside, in my unscientific poll, most people say they would most miss their photographs if all their belongings were irretrievably lost.

Many years ago, I bought a video camera. Of course, with my usual lack of marketplace acumen, I bought a beta video recorder, not VHS, but that is beside the point. Both formats are moot now. Our kids were little and I felt compelled to record their every moment. It is a phase through which many young parents pass, particularly those boomers raised on “Kodak Moment” pabulum. I dutifully fulfilled my fatherly obligation to posterity, recording holidays and birthdays, snow-fort building and summer beach fun. But after a while, a year or two, I stopped cold. I had watched a series of tapes I’d recorded, the kids being particularly little and cute, and it struck me hard and fast: I don’t want to watch this when I am old and they are grown and gone. I sensed a dark nascent warning, a potential for a wet-blanket-smothering depression. These tapes would prove to be an undeniable visual reminder of that which I no longer possessed: my youth and my future. My imagination, in my future viewing, delivered me to death’s door, and certain of the tapes would undoubtedly transport me, Black Dog in chase, across the transom. It is an admittedly contrary viewpoint, probably profoundly irrational, and I will likely regret my decision. But I’m not going to take the chance. No, no more videos. If the house burns, the videos stay. Same for the photos. My memory, unaided by even a photograph, will have to serve, as it should, being that much more exacting for its fragility.

I recently read a comment made by the critic Frank Kermode regarding a collection of his work, the compilation of which forced him to make some difficult decisions. He wrote that he had to confront “what ought and what ought not to be let go.” Precisely – and that is the troubling challenge. What ought to be not let go? To direct Kermode’s challenge to the world of the tangible, What would I pull from the burning house? Though not for lack of effort, I can’t think of a damned thing, leaving me to fear that I exist in a sub-human state, as to be so lacking in sentimentality that no thing has emotional value. Sentiment aside, to plumb the human desire for possession, is there no thing so essential that I cannot live without it? Again, I come up empty handed. The easy answers are not worth risking my life in the burning house. I would want my cell phone, because my wife and children call me on it. I would want my laptop because that has everything – some would say, “my life” – on it. And I would want my current reading material because I am a reader first. But these are all things that help me do the important stuff – they are not the important stuff – and can be replaced. They are nouns and I long for verbs, active verbs.

I have on occasion lived out of a backpack. There is a wonderful simple elegance in having everything one requires on one’s back. The unfettered freedom is palatable, and it does not surprise me, given the layered complexity of modern life, that backpacking is the most popular and widely practiced of outdoor activities. It is a relic, an unfathomable connection to a time when we as a species freely roamed anywhere and everywhere, Africa to the Bearing Straight, our only possessions the ones we carried. (It is a compelling thought that we, as a species, have walked at some time or another virtually everywhere.) The only thing I recall from my first reading of Walden is Thoreau’s admonition to simplify. (From the second reading, getting to know Henry David better, I thought: What a wild man. He would have been a curious houseguest, an experiment of his own making, a site to see.) Buddhist monks are sent into the world with only their robes and alms bowl. That is simplicity. Unencumbered is the word. An old woodsman I once met out in the Uinta Mountains of Utah said he could not conceive how a person could wake up in the morning and not see mountains on the horizon. He was someone who knew what was not only important to him, but necessary. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone,” wrote Thoreau. To be so compact and efficient, like a snail, or rather like my favorite amphibian, the common painted turtle, as to travel freely, wanting for nothing extraneous, is wildly releasing--and I think, close to an Absolute Truth, if such a thing existed. It is interesting that the painted turtle’s carapace is without a keel, gaining her a range of motion subject to the least interference. The physicist and the code writer strive for the most elegant and simple equation or line. The architect and the draftsman seek elegance in an edge, a bend or radius that bespeaks simplicity in form. It is, I think, innately clarifying that life reflect the same principal. There is an entry in Camus’ notebook, not even a sentence: That wild longing for clarity.

We have been educated, from Sunday school to Hollywood, that the prophets of old lived simply, by choice or divine edict, scratching out an existence, but living, at least in my imagination, a life of crystalline clarity. “The prophet is a fool, the man of spirit is mad,” wrote Hosea. I have visited the dusty expanse of the Middle East. There is good reason the desert breeds visionaries and madmen. Have we come very far? I am a struggling minimalist--they were beggars at the temple gate, voices in the wilderness, mad fools, to paraphrase Hosea. The man who goes to the 7-11 for milk at night and turns up ten years later living on the other coast in another life is, I think, the most creative prophet imaginable—though likely a personal wreck. He starts over, creating a new self, like a snake shedding its skin, with the knowledge of the old, but free of it. I started a novel once whereby the protagonist walked away in the middle of a workday from a successful business, leaving a wild and brief note for his partner: “You’re in charge. I’m out of here.” He disappeared to everyone who knew him. He walked right out of the novel and even I couldn’t find him. Bruce Chatwin is claimed to have telegraphed his boss at the London Sunday Times, “GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS.” I used to illogically figure that if I were ever imprisoned I would be forced to live a life of stark anti-materialism and simplicity. I would become a sequestered monk. Prison, in this warped fantasy, sounded an odd and freeing experience, albeit a dark one--a place devoid of human vanities and illusions. There is nothing to pull from the burning house where there is no house in the first place. In a moment of cold introspection, Chatwin recorded this thought: “Do we not gaze coldly at our clutter and say, ‘If these objects express my personality, then I hate my personality.’”

Nature strives to complexity. Organisms, like government, never evolve into smaller, more basic structures. On the contrary. That is the principal of evolution. To strive in the opposing direction, to simplicity, is counter to what our DNA is orchestrating behind the scene. Advertising, Madison Avenue and consumerism aside, this is biology. Perhaps we not only derive satisfaction from the material things that fill our lives, but are also fulfilling our genetic obligation to complexity. Of course this is metaphorical and not what nature had in mind. You will never see a migrating bird with a fanny pack.

It has been an insidious journey from the backpacking days of my youth. Some time ago my wife, daughter and I went away for a three-day weekend to the lake. They packed a bag or two. I loaded my bike on the overhead carrier, put my fly-fishing gear in the back, along with photography equipment, books, laptop and trail guides. Clothing too. They looked at me, the great yapping minimalist, their eyes challenging. My wife was miffed, my daughter humored. I was embarrassed. I advise against revealing such duplicity in front of loved ones; years of hard-earned respect will be snatched away in instant. Of course I was troubled in that way only self-reflection can trouble one. We are hardest on ourselves when honest. How had I traveled so far? So began my quest to answer the question of what ought to be not let go.

In reality, I am no longer worried by my lack of personal interest in possessions, which I believe suggests progress. I am no less human because I have no sentiment for things--in contradistinction, I think I am more so. Maybe our things can get in the way of our humanity. I do have many things still, far too many, but find comfort knowing that none are essential. I relish the freedom upon donating yet more purged stuff. To purge is clarifying and releasing. When I travel for short periods now I carry everything I need in a daypack. Two recent trips abroad found me managing fine with a simple carry-on. We have escaped the big house and moved to a place with less of a ‘footprint,’ to use a modern and descriptive word. I struggle to resist consumerism and have got rid of the big SUV for a small import. I know environmentalists applaud my efforts, and though that is a side benefit, my motives are largely to protect my personal environment – that is, to find clarity in simplicity, and if I can’t find it readily, then to carve it out. It took a long time to get to this place from which I must start again, only in reverse.

The house is on fire. My family and dog Maggie are safely outside. I am running through the burning rooms one last time, sirens in the background. I pick up nothing but speed, rushing freely and without burden to the open portal.

Still, I cannot ignore that most people want to rescue their photographs from the burning house.

“Why do we take pictures?” asked my father.

Me, my father, uncle, aunt and cousins are sitting around a kitchen table. There is a pile of old black and white photographs spread out in front of us, a family archive. Some go back, as best we can determine, a hundred years. They are in remarkable condition, having been stored in boxes in the garage of my late cousin in California. They are family records, created by a clan that had faith in the value of the visual. It is spring in Indiana and cold outside. Inside I relish the warm glow of family comfort. My father and I traveled from the east coast for this, to join our family and sort through these pictures, all five cartons of them. We had been at it a few hours when my dad, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of photographs and the memories they evoked – he had grown quiet an hour previous – pushed the photos away and into the center of the table, folded his arms, and asked the question. “Why do we take pictures?” No one really heard him – or if they did did not want to hazard a response.

To paraphrase Susan Sontag, photography is the only art form where the viewer perceives the work from the vantage point of the artist. Concerns regarding the artistic nature of photography aside, Sontag is correct. My father was experiencing the photos through the photographer’s viewfinder. Before him his ancestry played out. Had he crossed the bridge I feared, taken the journey I had hoped to avoid by setting the family videos aside? His future was no longer and the people in the photos before him were all dead. I once discovered a century calendar. That is, contained within two sheets of paper was displayed every year and every month and every day for the next one hundred years – as if the future could be reckoned so simply. I looked at it, the calendar, and said to the person with me, Somewhere here is the day I will die. I made a motion over the calendar with my hand, like a magician, presto. My father was looking back, reverse of the one hundred years and I wonder if he sensed the end of the calendar, if not his own calendar, then the calendars of all those whose image lay on the kitchen table in front of him, beings wiped from the slate of time.

There was a packet of small photos in the collection, wrapped in browned paper. I unfolded it. I held in my hands two typewritten pages, signed by my father, mailed home from Germany, dated June 4th, 1945. I handed the packet to him. A dozen pocket size photos tumbled out. A bridge in Luxembourg, the Eiffel Tower with my father standing in uniform in front, a Paris cafe, a bombed village square. He read the letter, fifty-four years after he composed it. Everyone stopped what they were doing and listened. Then he reviewed the photos. He recalled that he had them printed in a little photo shop in Carlsbad. I have taken pictures for over thirty years and when I see one of my photographs I can remember exactly the instant I released the shutter. This is not as uncommon as it sounds among photographers. Dad recalled every photo and had a little story to accompany each one. He especially liked the image from Luxembourg and said he had printed it many times himself in a makeshift darkroom while in the army in Europe. He doubted that he still had the negative. There is mythic power contained in that.

Of his project, The Americans, the photographic genius, Robert Frank, said, “I thought of something Malraux wrote: ‘To transform destiny into awareness.’” Applied to photography Malraux’s expression encapsulates the answer to my father’s query: Why do we take photographs? By definition a photograph speaks to the future, if not destiny. A photograph is made in the hope that someone will look at it. By doing so, we, the viewers have completed the transaction--otherwise we are simply voyeurs. Even the creative photographer is viewer, self-referentially.

In 1984 the photographer Garry Winogrand prematurely died of cancer. His survivors discovered left behind 2,500 rolls of exposed but undeveloped black-and-white film; another 6,500 rolls that had been developed but not proofed; another 3,000 rolls that had been developed and proofed, but not edited. All told, 12,000 rolls of film exposed in the last six years of his life. That makes 432,000 pictures he made but never saw, or approximately 200 exposures a day. My father’s question is redundant in the face of such magnitude.

Until the advent of digital photography and the technology of immediate review on the camera back, the photographer had to wait until the lab returned the images to confirm his or her awareness of that photographic instant. The lag is now compressed, but can never be erased, even at shutter speed 4000th of a second. Zeno’s paradox can be applied, a distance can always be divided by half ensuring one’s destination will never be reached. The camera can never capture the present, only the past. But I am growing obtuse. Mind you, we were simple people sitting around a kitchen table looking at old pictures. We had just eaten cheeseburgers with pickles and chips.

Photographs are not so much possessions as they are spirits, even memory incarnate. I am not talking about the so-called fine art photographs or journalism. I am referring to the family snapshot: the kids at the beach, Grandma on the porch, the birthday cake and the kids dressed for the prom and the first car. The soldier in front of the Eiffel Tower. They are spirits, ghosts of an exhausted instant. The moment the shutter is released something new is made that did not exist previously. So why do photographs get rescued most from the burning house? I suspect because we cannot release our sprits so generously to the flames.