by Adam Gopnik
But the reality of recreational winter is that it is cosmopolitan too, and city-made — hybridized and mongrelized and made up of the deepest demands and needs of mixed-up people for mixed-up pleasures. The escape from the mind and its anxieties leads us back to . . . the mind and its anxieties. Throughout these chapters the single thing that I’ve tried to emphasize most is that the modern idea of winter begins with an idea of Romantic escape; it begins with an idea of release from the too rationalized, the too Cartesian, the too reasonable systems of the French Enlightenment and takes us instead into a world of natural purity and natural authority. And this escape takes place in different forms, from painting to patinage.
Yet every time we’ve looked more deeply into that idea, it turns out to be partial, incomplete, inadequate to lived experience. Just as you can expel nature with a pitchfork and she’ll always return, so you can flee your culture on skis or skates but she will always eventually catch you. You make up dreams of pure pond hockey, then its history turns out to be a truth about ethnic rivalry in the heart of a cosmopolitan city. There is no escape from sexuality, from the struggles of clans, from social life. We race into the corners of the pond and find there the corners of our own minds. The philosophical skater may have found his solitude, but there is a girl with a snowball waiting in her fist. The pattern we see in the story of recreational winter is just like the pattern we saw in those of Romantic and recuperative winter — that the most cosmopolitan, urban, even, if you insist, corrupting ambiguities of modern culture are all present in each step the skater takes on his way to that white pond in the woods, onto the face of that blue five-dollar bill. When we choose the solitary path of spinning at evening, we sense intimations of the social life that will begin again in the morning. As that great skater William Wordsworth knew in every chilly Lake District winter, a time of rapture is the end result of a sequence of reasons. As we throw our bodies to the wind, our minds open up to the world.
FIVE
REMEMBERING WINTER
The Season in Silence
Ice wine, as every drinker knows, is sweetness made from stress. That’s not news, or not exactly. All good wine takes its essential sugar from the stress of its circumstances: pinot noir, the grape of the cold country of Champagne, gets flabby and soupy as the climate warms. But ice wine is extreme sweetness made from extraordinary stress. Every winter the grapes on the Niagara Peninsula are left not merely to chill but to actually freeze — the worst thing that normally can happen to fruit — and then the brutal cold forces all the natural sugar into the core of the grape, where it waits to be pressed out.
And in that simple paradox — the hardest weather makes the nicest wine — lies a secret that gives shape to the winter season, and to our feelings about it. Without the stress of cold in a temperate climate, without the cycle of the seasons experienced not as a gentle swell up and down but as an extreme lurch, bang! from one quadrant of the year to the next, a compensatory pleasure would vanish from the world. There is a lovely term in botany — vernalization — referring to seeds that can only thrive in spring if they have been through the severity of winter. Well, many aspects of our life have become, in the past several hundred years, “vernalized.” (Even those who live in warmth recognize the need for at least the symbols of the cold, as in all that sprayed-on snow in Los Angeles in December.) If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely; if we didn’t think of spring in winter, or search winter to find some new emotion of its own to make up for the absent ones, half of the keyboard of life would be missing. We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no black keys.
Winter stress makes summer sweetness — and the stress of warm times makes us long for the strange sweetness of cold ones. Not a bad place to start, perhaps, especially if coupled with the most beautiful of all stressed-out-by-summer, longing-for-winter songs. We’ve started every chapter with imagined music, and let’s begin this one with “River,” Joni Mitchell’s great song from her ever-more-classic album Blue, whose subject is really that of a girl from Saskatchewan finding herself adrift in love and celebrity, in the islands of the Caribbean and the deserts of southern California, and of memory turning at that moment to winter, to a memory of skating on a river in Saskatchewan long ago and long before. (In fact, Joni turned that into an entire album of memories about Saskatchewan just two years ago.) The song is about one river and one woman — but it’s also about so much we’ve touched on: about the myth of the hockey pond, about solitary skating, above all about Christmas, about the loss of winter in a warm climate. How shall we sing the songs of winter in a warm climate?
There is a literature of exile from the South, one that ordinary literate readers know well. The great Australian critic and poet Clive James’s most recent book of poems is called Opal Sunset, and it is all about remembering Australian youth and Australian sunshine from chilly Cambridge. “Go back to the opal sunset,” he implores himself, where there’s wine and avocado and sun all day. There’s an important literature from the Caribbean too, about remembering the South from exile in the North. Derek Walcott turns to that subject again and again, with twin themes of lost pleasure and of the apparent (though only apparent) lack of “seriousness” one must feel in a sunny land without four seasons, with its superficial joys (or at least our too superficial sense of them). “Winter adds depth and darkness to life as well as to literature, and in the unending summer of the tropics not even poverty or poetry . . . seems capable of being profound because the nature around it is so exultant, so resolutely ecstatic, like its music. A culture based on joy is bound to be shallow,” Walcott said in his Nobel acceptance speech. The southern writer envies or is frustrated by the assumption of “that seriousness that comes only out of culture with four seasons.” How can there be a people down there? he asks — knowing full well that there are but that the pleasure we take in their idyllic surroundings conspires to suppress, or simplify, their real existence.
Well, in return, there is a smaller but equally strong literature written in the South, remembering the North — whether made by expatriate nineteenth-century Russian poets in France or expatriate Canadian singers in Los Angeles. And where the southern writer expatriated to winter lands tries to explain that there are people down there, the banished writer from the winter countries tries to explain (or sing) that there are pleasures up there. “I wish I had a river to skate away on . . .” Joni sings. And so their thoughts and songs turn again and again to the pleasures of recollection itself — to the reality that winter seems to act as a kind of magical place of memory, a storehouse of things recalled.
Stress makes sweetness, and snow and ice are the frosting of loss. In all of these chapters, so far the one obvious text that I haven’t cited, that I haven’t referred to at all and have been saving for this last descant, is in one sense the best text, the most important single poetic text about winter that we possess. And that’s François Villon’s beautiful fifteenth-century love poem, “Ballad of Yesterday’s Beauties,” as it’s sometimes called, with its lists of long-lost belles and its repeated refrain: “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?”
The line seems to leap right out of its Renaissance setting to become a permanent modern refrain. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s famous translation — “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” — is, I think, misleading, because it gives the poem an archaizing tone, false to its real emotion. A simpler translation would be better: “Where have the snows gone?” Or better yet, “Where are the snows we knew?” Or even, as one more acerbic translator has offered, “Well, where are yesterday’s snows?” For the refrain is double-packed: both sardonic and, in the best sense, sentimental. On the one hand, we know where the old snows are — they’ve melted, and for good. On the other hand, they linger strongly in memory, like great beauties who have aged or passed away. And in that line’s double sense is an intimation (evoked, we know, at the height of that little
ice age) that somehow winter — the dead season, the off-season, the bleak season, the null season — is actually and secretly the season in which we store our own sense of the past.
My subject in this last essay is remembering winter, and I want to talk about the loss of winter in three different but entangled senses. First in the simple, largely positive sense in which, as architecture changes and technology grows, we are capable of being further and further removed from the season. (We walk around in the subterranean city in Montreal and think, Oh my God, it’s cold outside?) Second, in the objective, if ominous and even cosmic, sense that winter may be passing away from us as the result of man-wrought global warming, and that our relationship to it has changed and is still changing. (We walk in the Arctic — at least, some do — and think, Is it still cold outside?) And finally, and most mysteriously — and I may risk getting lost here in philosophical snowdrifts from which my frozen body will someday be recovered, a risk I shall have to take, stiff-lipped as a British polar explorer — but not least important, in the sense in which winter and the idea of memory remain almost mystically entangled in the modern mind.
These are three very different senses of remembering winter, but they group around a common meditative norm: how do we incorporate a mechanical, mineral act — the fact of a season not made for us and indifferent in every sense to our existence — into our sense of time and order? How does a season produced by the tilts of poles and the presence of climate cycles that are going on in every uninhabited planet in the solar system, how could these simple physical events engage and attach themselves to our lives?
Now, all of nature is in one sense indifferent to our selves; there’d be summer too if no one were here to see it. There is a July on Venus, a spring on Mars, all with no one there to witness them. But with winter we approach this truth more starkly. In spring and summer our sense of harmony comes more easily, with less stress: we were made in, and made for, times and weather like this. We have at least the illusion of being woven into the climate. We were made for the temperate ease of the savannah, and we constantly have to build savannah boxes around ourselves just to survive. Nobody’s at home above the Arctic Circle — and yet, somehow, we are. Nobody is even “naturally” at home in Canada — “a few acres of snow” — and yet, somehow, here we are. To make winter, to distinguish and discriminate its pleasures and terrors, requires an effort of mind and memory as great as any modern people have attempted.
You’ll recall that in the early nineteenth century the invention of central heating — of steam heat and the radiator — played a large role in making a newly Romantic idea of winter. Winter became emancipated from its threat, something that you could look at and talk about rather than something that you simply had to seize up about. Warm people like to look at cold scenes. And, doubting their nerve, they like to go out into them too, as hot people like to jump into frigid swimming pools.
But you’ll recall that there was also a deeper idea present at the birth of central heating in nineteenth-century Britain, and that was the idea that central heating was tied to a new conception of architecture: an architecture not of brick and stone alone, not simply of mass, but of air — an envelope of warm air. Every new practice of building has a new idea of living implicit in it, and the new idea of living implied by central steam heat was of man freed to live (semi-naked, if he liked) within a space where heat was evenly distributed, where the old divide between hugging the hearth and standing by the window would slowly disappear. We really had achieved, or were on the verge of achieving, full realization of the savannah box in the middle of a Glasgow winter. Natural man, even the naked savage, could be reborn indoors. And that idea is one that has grown, changed, and transformed in our own time; you could create a whole alternative universe inside that could be an antidote to the world outside.
And so central heating, as much as it brought us into a new relationship with winter, changed our urban experience of winter. Now, one of the odd things about winter and urbanism is that in many ways nineteenth-century people were more successful at incorporating winter experiences into city places than we are. If you look at nineteenth-century engravings, if you trace nineteenth-century city history, you’ll see that there is an incredible richness of urban life designed to explore and increase the joy of winter. My beloved adopted city of Paris is a wonderful instance of this. In the late nineteenth century Paris had six or so working ice rinks, an “ice palace,” and a wonderful kind of dance bar called the North Pole. When MGM made Colette’s Gigi back in the 1950s, a key scene was set at an ice rink; on location in Paris, since none any longer existed, the movie crew had to counterfeit one of their own. Visit Paris now and try to go skating: you have to wait for them to set up a little rink outside the Hôtel de Ville around Christmastime, and if you actually have hockey skates you’re a phenomenon. In Ottawa, the capital of Canada, there was a Crystal Palace with a toboggan chute that apparently used to run all the way down to the Ottawa River.
Many elements played a part in this change; there are no mono-causal phenomena in life, save perhaps for sex and lingerie. What happened to cut off the urban experience from winter was of course the same thing that happened to the city in every other way, the introduction of the ultimate small-scale combined confessional booth and savannah box: the car. It would be, I suppose, something of an exaggeration to say that the past century was shaped beyond all other things by a constant, losing fight between the soul-destroying demands of the car and the soul-enriching values of the city for the inner life of modern man and woman, but it would not really be much of an exaggeration. The truth is that what cars need is almost the exact opposite of what cities need. Cars need places to park, and those places, in their scale and single purpose, are inherently antihuman. Cars need drawers to lodge in, wide-spaced feet to run on; they lame street movement and create cross-town paralysis. Cities, by contrast, need corners to live on, narrow streets to easily cross, squares and piazzas — a whole array of architectural arrangements that enable the gift of density to blossom and for life to become interconnected and interchanged. What the car buys you in convenience it kills in civic capital. A parking lot is a cemetery of civil society. (It is, perhaps, not entirely an accident, or at least a good grim joke, that the Victoria Rink in Montreal, where hockey was born, is now a parking garage, and the game is mostly learned and played far away from the centre of town.)
The winter city would seem to be the last place where the car-and-city problem can be solved. Winter drives people off the streets into cars, and the worse the winter, the graver the continuing crises of cities and cars. But, by a series of contingencies — the usual mix of the imaginative individual who plants a seed and the lucky terrain it falls on — it turns out that the worse the winter, the more ingenious the urban solution can become and the more revived city life can be. Stress burrows down and makes another kind of sweetness. This is evidenced all over the world in winter cities — and, indeed, in what is called the “winter cities movement,” which stretches from Finland to Minneapolis and Calgary — but I think is best evidenced in my own hometown of Montreal.
When I was a mostly miserable adolescent, my one keen pleasure was to do what we called “juking” from school; I would cut class and go walking in the underground city in Montreal. You could begin at Place Ville Marie, which in those days had wonderfully uniform signage and two little movie theatres (both gone now) and proceed down an inviting cavern into Central Station, which still held, as Canadian railway stations mostly do, the sense of bustle and purpose that a railway station should. (American railway stations have all become bus stations or graveyards.) There were wonderful art deco bas-relief murals there, showing gravely stylized scenes from winter sports: hockey players staring down the puck like costumed dancers in a Fred Astaire chorus, lacrosse players right out of an RKO set. (Puzzlingly, the frieze seemed to change colours regularly, from red to blue and back again. I have never been able to
discover if this was a trick of the lighting or a hallucination of my adolescence.)
And from there you could proceed into the gloomier but still impressive brutalist spaces of Place Bonaventure. Or else, proceeding in the opposite direction, you could pick up the Metro there and, quickly enough, head out to the western part of downtown, where the corridor would take you to funky Alexis Nihon Plaza (they hadn’t made it a place yet), dense with the smell of doughnuts and hot dogs — chiens chauds, as the then perfectly reasonable French translation had it — and very nearby the Montreal Forum, where the greatest of all hockey teams past and present, the Canadiens of the seventies, still reigned; and continue down a tiled corridor with a bend and a mirror, if I recall, to the most elegant of Montreal developments, Westmount Square, which had an American-style coffee shop and entrancing women’s clothing stores. All of this was nothing like a mall, for malls are made to wander up and down in and cunningly — or shamefully — designed to keep the visitor on a constant turning hamster wheel of big retail. This was purposeful wandering, a boy’s footsteps, happy and, in the dead of winter, warm. There were odd, stale smells then, but you could weirdly waltz right through a whole world. I had to read the English writer Keith Waterhouse’s wonderful memoir, City Lights: A Street Life, about walking on similar illicit grounds in Leeds in the 1930s — his happy wanderings all above ground, of course — to be reminded of my own sense of the joys of a proud provincial capital for a teenage boy.