I burned my old journals tonight.  More than 1,000 pages hand-written pages going back to 1980.  I’m am tempted to say that as the flames consumed the torn off chunks of pages in my fireplace, spirits were released from the papers—sadness, passion, confusion, existential angst, so many emotional moments "captured" in ink, until tonight.   Except that it would not make sense, even if one were to speak of “spirits” in a metaphorical sense.   You see, I painstakingly scanned all of the pages first, and then I backed it all up on an external drive.  I’m trying to get rid of paper, converting almost every scrap of paper I own into a pdf.   Therefore, there's no need for any "spirits" to be released from the pages, although looking at the haunting flames made me occasionally wonder.  Then again, if I were a spirit trapped in a piece of paper, I probably wouldn't understand anything about computers or scans, so I might nonetheless assume a haunting flame shape as my piece of paper burned.