Winter Lament

1/10/11

        At work today, I walked by two colleagues who, like so many, were discussing the forecasted snowstorm.  Already sick of winter myself I expected them to complain about the cold and snow.  Instead, both men descried the timidity of those lamenting the onslaught of snow.  I shouldn’t have been surprised; when nasty winter weather seizes our attention, we can predict at least two reactions.  One is how intolerable the conditions are.  The second, mentioned above, features stoicism, real or posed, acknowledging and accepting the obdurate facts of winter. There is a third, infrequently observed possibility, that comes from those who love the snow and cold; for now, I’ll leave that inexplicable group for another time.
        As for myself, I find it harder each winter to muster the stoicism I thought innate to my character and difficult not to bemoan winter weather the way I do (loudly) summer mugginess and heat.  I venture outside each frigid morning and tighten my jaw and stomach as the freezing air stings my nose and cheeks.  No one could believe such an early blast could be bracing and energizing, but there are some who actually claim this. In the afternoons I like to walk for exercise; a brisk twenty-five minutes in the cold, fresh air arouses me from the torpor that fills the mind and eyes in those initial post-meridian hours.  Despite being refreshed, I am relieved always to get back inside the warm house. 
        When I was young, I loved to watch snow falling through the dark night blanketing the tree boughs in white shrouds.  Something mystical or sublime seem to gesture to me with each lilting flake; something mellifluous like the rhythm and rhyme of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  Though a beauty still descends with each night snowfall, the numinous is absent.  To illustrate my point, here’s Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Snow Man”:


                                           
         

         One must have a mind of winter       
         To regard the frost and the boughs            
         Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
         

         And have been cold a long time
         To behold the junipers shagged with ice,           

        The spruces rough in the distant glitter
         

         Of the January sun; and not to think          
         Of any misery in the sound of the wind,       
         In the sound of a few leaves,
         

         Which is the sound of the land         
         Full of the same wind          
         That is blowing in the same bare place
         

         For the listener, who listens in the snow,         

         And, nothing himself, beholds          
         Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

          The “misery” evoked by the sound of wind chaffs any who expect to find the comfort or certainty of an Emersonian sublime in the poem.  Stevens offers is a state of “mind” that might ignore (“not to think”) the “misery” that sweeps with the wind across the landscape.  But however stoically one withstands winter, nothing can negate the ubiquitous cruelty of this season.  That would require some transcendent power the twenty-first century imagination can no longer conjure.  The best we can do is collect whatever peace can be found in the dark and cold.