I am a member of one of the last hidden, marginalized minority groups here at Harvard.

We don't have a club.

We don't have an a cappella group.

We don't have a ribbon or a catchy slogan.

We barely even have an agenda.

People laugh at what we do and whisper that we're sadists.

We can express ourselves by occasionally wearing a cryptic T-shirt or taking sideways glance as we're walking to Loker Commons.

We call ourselves Fire Buffs.

For us, excitement is the fire engine, the hoses and the nozzles, the rapidly flashing lights and the scream of the siren.

It's the tower truck, hundred-foot ladders and powerful streams of steamy water. It's in the heroism of the fire department and the heat of a four-alarm worker.

It's in the psychology of what we most fear and in the passion and compassion for those who've lost a home or a loved one.

Perhaps something seems aberrant or even slightly sensual in all this. But for me, the love of fire-buffing is Platonic, couched in the aesthetics of movement and of sound and of sight and of rhythm.

But, as the over-bloated and from-the-heart prose above no doubt reveals, fire-buffing can be an obsession.

Desperately trying to memorize Sartre's conception of the soi the night before a final exam last year, I heard a full assignment of Cambridge trucks dispatched to a fire more than a mile away.

The spirit seized me.