Burning Bridges
One of the easiest things to do is to burn something. Take an old letter from an ex-admirer: one flick of the lighter, and it is gone. Memories made into ash, obligations carbonised into flames, all proof destroyed. In the age of paper, burning was easy - memories could be wiped out, evidence destroyed, clandestine paths covered. It got trickier with digital memory: pointing a phone at the face of a sleeping person can open Pandora’s box to lay bare the life of a person. Some are meticulous about hiding, because burning is no longer an option - location tracking turned off, message records obsessively cleared, two-factor authentication and multiple passwords on phones to hide what can no longer be burned. Yet there is still much to burn, and in relationships, vanity leads to a confidence that new ties are strong enough to reduce old ones to ashes. Back in 1693, William Congreve, the British playwright, used the phrase “burn bridges” in The Old Bachelor to describe a man who destroyed ...