Winter

by Adam Gopnik

  Time passes, inexorably, and the hold we have on it is often simply the distinctions we make within it — the names we give each moment. And so winter has been a testing ground of that Adamic act, the simple act of naming. No effort at naming, discriminating, enduring, explaining, mystifying, fabulizing has been keener than ours with winter over the past two centuries. Even if we were to lose our season, we would not lose all our meanings for it. We could lose the polar icecaps but we would not stop hearing winter music. We could lose the muse and keep the music, since the music makes the muse: our desire for meaning creates the imaginary persona who gives it to us, even though this leaves us adrift in a world of perpetual regret and loss, where we prefer the iceberg to the drifting ship.

  But perhaps perpetual regret and loss is the price we pay for our knowledge of time. Our effort at making winter lives, our mind for winter — from the poems of Wallace Stevens to the underground mall — has some of the simple dignity of naming things. We sense this in every effort, by poet or polar explorer, not just to prevail in the face of pain but to create in the face of chaos, of mere blankness — to make something, if no more than a name. For me there is no more comic and moving artefact than the Arctic maps of the nineteenth century, with their carefully chosen colonial names for coves and passages and bays that before were just wastelands out there somewhere.

  I sometimes stop and wonder at the reality of the geological and biological world, that the things we see, though certainly existing, have none of the intense sequence, the personifications, the character we give them; without us they would just fall back into the world of nothing. I have a hard time expressing this, though it is one of the strongest emotions I know: this sense that somehow the entirety of the universe could have been made — was made — without purpose, that it is cold, spinning, unconscious, neither kind nor cruel, just following laws that are in the end not even laws, just regularities produced by the cycling of chances. A vast, empty room, with no one home.

  There are moments in painting when you get a glimpse of the vast indifference of nature — not only that nature doesn’t care about us but that it doesn’t care about itself. I’m aware there are those who insist on a sense, half mystical and half material, that the planet protects itself — the idea of Gaia — but I think we are seeing that one with our hearts. We are inside, naming and making, while outside the world doesn’t give a damn; yet we persuade ourselves that it’s a season bound by many symbols, a Christmas card picture, a thing, a state, a friend. It’s winter.

  I recall once when I got word that my best friend was dying and I happened to pass a paint store where all the shades of yellow were laid out and named, quite cleverly and precisely — lemon zest and buttercup and canary, each shade given a personality — and I thought, This is all a lie. The spectrum of light is as indifferent as the rest of the universe. “Buttercup” and “lemon zest” were not labels but just lies, hopeful names given to arbitrary swatches in a physical phenomenon of light, which is not only indifferent to our existence but without any kind of neat internal structure at all, with no more charm or colour than the indifferent hum of a radio on the wrong station.

  There are moments when we can experience winter as, in effect, the universe experiences it: loveless and emotionless and just there, an endless cycling of physical law that is not just indifferent to our feelings but in some sense so arbitrary that it doesn’t even have the quality of being elemental. There are moments when I almost think that I sense, with fear, the reality of the cosmos as it is: just this big, huge nothing, billions of years old, without segments or seasons or anything in it, where the truth of the universe is just that it brutally is. We live in a cold world.

  But instead we give the coldness names, we write it poetry, we play it music, we experience it as a personality — and this is and remains the act of humanism. Armed with that hope, we see not waste and cold but light and mystery and wonder and something called January. We see not stilled atoms in a senseless world. We see winter.

  I know there is something arrogant and imperial in this idea, and I am well aware that Eastern forms of meditation, for which I have great respect, in effect try to extinguish our efforts to name and distinguish and discriminate, and to return us to the choiceless void that is the reality in which we dance, in which these too-neat oppositions — North and South, winter and summer, Canada and the United States, even me going on and on and you reading patiently — don’t exist. That way, we escape the cycle of need. I get it, I admire it. But my heart is with the opposite, humane effort to pretend that what we see is not blank cold but real winter — l’hiver, Persephone’s mourning, Vivaldi’s inverno, Schubert’s wasteland, even Krieghoff’s peasant dances and Monet’s elegant effets. That we have extended this act of lending human feeling where there isn’t any is a mistake, I don’t doubt, but it makes it possible to welcome the end. It gives Demeter’s mourning meaning.

  I said that I had deliberately left out and saved two winter touchstones, two true meteorites from which ore has been flinted, until now. One was Villon’s poem and the other is the famous myth of the Inuit having thirty or more words for snow. The “Eskimo vocabulary hoax” it’s called disparagingly by its debunkers — Inuit languages are agglutinative, we now know, so they have no more “words” for snow than English does; they just compress their sentences more, for the sweetness of simplicity. Nonetheless, the story registers as a folk tale with a memorable moral: if you see snow, you’ll discriminate snow. When people say the Inuit see so many kinds of snow because they have so many words for it, they don’t really mean that the Inuit are prisoners of their tongue; they mean that their tongues are like “Snowflake” Bentley’s microscopic eye, able to make tiny, fine discriminations lost on the rest of us. It’s a compliment, however misstated. And the compliment is that where we see and name only one thing, they see and name many things. Where we see the enormous body of a white whale, they see each whisker on its chin. They don’t have more words for snow, but snow finds its way into their words. Snow falls in the Inuit tongues as it falls in the circles where they live. The Inuit have more expressions for snow because they talk about it more.

  An obvious idea but not, I think, a fatuous one: without the talk, no differences; without the language, no lore; without the meteorites, no chipping; without the Inuit to do the chipping, no knives; without the knives, no winter civilization; and without that, no winter life. Not thirty labels found for a world already labelled, but thirty or more for a world in need of names, endless efforts at description — melting snow, gathering snow, frosted snow, snow over a layer of ice, snow stretching out, skiable snow, pliable snow, resistant snow. All these words are not labels found at ease but worlds described with effort.

  The last moral of all these winter stories can be simply summar­ized: things have names because acts have authors. That, for me, is the whole of what we mean, or should mean, by humanism, in one monosyllabic sentence. Winter takes its names from winter people. This is true in a simple way. Shackleton and his companions, crossing Georgia Island from the wrong side in the last, bitter leg of their long journey to be rescued, were disoriented above all because the peaks they crossed had no names on the maps they used. Each name given to a cove or peak or plain created by chance forces is a hook to hang your mental hat on. It took a lot of other explorers a long time to name each feature, and each feature’s name reflected the wants and needs of the namer.

  But it goes deeper too. Those things that we think of as being big waves of response actually have significant individual authors. Whether it’s William Cowper for the first time understanding that the experience of winter by the fireside can be positive and cheering, rather than depressing and forbidding, or Vincent Ponte seeing that the real life of the city lay not in the plaza above but in the underground below, each of these moments turns out to have a specific author. From naming the thousand kinds of icebergs to finding the individual shapes of
snowflakes, from the rules for icing in hockey to the invention of the Christmas card, each thing exists because one individual gave form to something that had been unformed and unnamed before. It didn’t happen by osmosis; it didn’t happen by consensus; it didn’t happen, God knows, by divine creation. Osmosis may have helped, and consensus happens for a reason, but finally each one of these acts can be broken down into the strange lives and stifled longings of our neighbours.

  Things have names because acts have authors. For many, that kind of humanism is hubris. To describe is to dominate, to name is to numb, to explore is to exploit, and certainly to explain one thing is to extinguish another — to map is to oppress the islands left uncharted. Certainly, in any history, we see and are glad when the things left out find a way to be put back in, whether it’s Fanny Mendelssohn or the overlooked Inuit at the polar moment. But either this claim is always true — if to describe is to dominate, then that is true of any description, even remedial ones — or else trivial: we can only do our best.

  Winter started as this thing we had to get through; it has ended as this time to hold on to. A cycle becomes a season; a season becomes a secular holiday; the solstice becomes feasts. I don’t know what sound a tree makes when it falls and there’s no one to hear it. None, I think. But I do know that the cycle of seasons on Mars or Jupiter, lacking witnesses, is not a cycle at all, neatly shaped with four distinct faces, but just a slow shading, a flat, uninflected turning, as dumb and dull as any other purely physical inexorable cycle repeated into eternity. Noise in the forest without someone there to hear? Maybe. Summer and winter on Mars without people there to name them? I’m certain not. Deeper than the question of why there is something rather than nothing is the truth that something has a shape that only we can give it, the neat segmentation that gives us an illusion of order.

  Where are the snows we knew? Where are the winters we recall? Locked inside us, in an idea about time and space that we can hardly accept but can tag with names and nostalgia, so that they are not quite lost. We go down deep and we miss the window; the passage clears and we miss the ice in California as Joni Mitchell dreams of the frozen river. We suffer and we long for memory, we draw a glacier and we draw ourselves, we make up Christmas and the bleak midwinter is suddenly no longer bleak but beautiful. We end up like Friedrich’s French soldier in the snow, lost in the forest, counting snowflakes, seeing how they differ, right to the point of death. What the winter journey of the modern imagination teaches us is not that God is in the details but that our ability to grasp and discriminate the details gives us something to put in place of God.

  I write these lines on a tiny island in the Caribbean where, like so many winter people, I have gone with my family to seek a week’s refuge from March’s bite. When I was young, watching snow fall by the window, I thought the idea of fleeing south was a kind of madness, or at least a kind of weakness — who except the exhausted would go to Florida, or Jamaica, or the little isle of Nevis? Well, now I am in what we politely call middle age (though it is further along the spectrum than that) and the lure of the South seems real to me. Who needs another winter? Then I think of spending Christmas here or of living here for good — and I cringe a little.

  I realize that these chapters, in the guise of cultural observations and a kind of amateur’s cultural anthropology, are really a composite list of things that I like and that I don’t, like those of a Playmate of earlier vintage: her turn-ons and turn-offs. I hate cars, concussions, hockey violence generally, southern California at Christmas, Carlyle’s politics, postmodern condescension to pre-modern peoples as much as postmodernists hate pre-modern condescension to alien ones . . . I love Christmas carols, A Christmas Carol, Dickens and Trollope, free-skating and fast-passing Russian and Quebec hockey, and courage of the kind that drove people towards the poles, which I wish I had more of.

  Above all, I suppose, I love snow, in all its forms, and though I am sure I would lose this taste if I had to endure enough of it, so far I’ve endured a lot and lost not a bit. Winter is, once again, the white page on which we write our hearts. They would look different on a greener page. We name things in Hawaii; people remember in Tahiti; the Serengeti plain in torrid Africa was the first site where people thought as people still do. When we lose a powerful symbol of order, some other symbol comes to take its place. Human beings are matchlessly good at making them. But when we lose, through the vagaries of life or history, some powerful symbol of order, we feel the loss, and we should spend a minute mourning it. In our time, for instance, we have lost the idea of the naked human body as an image of divine order, seen it either pushed into fractured form or else made merely a revivalist symbol, or poked to the happy but less edifying margins of erotic art. We can’t remake the nude, because the forces that unmade it are too strong and tidal to be resisted. But we can mourn the loss of the tradition it made and the values it embodied. Without winter, our sense of memory would be different, not over — but different is a kind of over. Life is always different, not over, and it is different that we really mind. When it is over, we won’t be around to notice, but we know when it is different, and we feel sorry for the loss.

  “I wish I had a river I could skate away on,” Joni Mitchell tells us, lost in Los Angeles as she longs for snows once known. Où sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the old snows? Inside us, where they remain compressed, perhaps frozen, but still capable of being forced out from memory and finely articulated, or at least sweetly sung. Where did they go? Inside us, where they remain, as winter remains my favourite season. I still see the boy at the window, my own otherwise lost self, and feel him thinking, Oh, a new place, the ice palace, the river, my home — my new home — look at the snow falling, hear how quiet it gets! For the time being, at least, the snow still falls, and the world, like this speaker, is given the winter gift of silence.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The books and articles listed in this bibliography are my sources for most of the information contained before — drawn from these diligent scholars who dig weird data from the hard ice of time, and then have them packed into soft snowballs by delinquent essayists. Those that I have used at particular length I have tried to shout out in the right, specific moment in this book, as well. Special thanks also to Ian Bostridge, who set me right on Schubert; to Jane Hirschfeld, who told me so much about the Japanese idea of winter; and to Leland de la Durantaye, who suggested and supplied the epigraph from Frye.

  There are many other people to thank. For diligent fact-checking, thanks to Nathaniel Stein at The New Yorker, and to Daniel Aureliano Newman and Letitia Henville at Massey College. And thanks, too, to Assistant Editor Kelly Joseph and Editorial Assistant Meredith Dees at Anansi, who worked so hard, particularly on the photo research and acquiring permissions. And my gratitude as well to Sarah MacLachlan, overseeing at Anansi, and Bernie Lucht and Philip Coulter of the CBC’s still matchless Ideas series, and to my friend and lawyer, Michael Levine.

  Let me praise at length three more: editor Janie Yoon of Anansi, who, with quiet wit and careful intelligence, helped me work and rework these chapters; it’s the first time we have gone to war together and I can only say I hope we find another occasion to put on our armour. Next, my research consultant David A. Smith, without whose matchless grasp of the resources of the New York Public Library I would never have been able to write this book at all; he found source after source with a persistence nearly magical — to name a problem was to be provided with a book, and to worry about an issue was to be given a reference. And Ariel C. Knutson, my invaluable assistant and apprentice, who prepared the bibliography below for publication — and who also collated passages, shared lunches, transcribed the living-room lectures, read texts, offered notes, kept my spirits up, shared Justin Bieber pictures with my daughter, and generally offered more aid and comfort to an over-committed and often frantic writer than anyone should ever have to. She has my deep (and frankly slightly awestruck) gratitude.<
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  ONE: ROMANTIC WINTER

  CANADIAN ART AND CULTURE

  Adamson, Jeremy. Lawren S. Harris: Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes, 1906–1930. Art Gallery of Ontario, January 14–February 26, 1978. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978.

  Barbeau, Marius. Cornelius Krieghoff: Pioneer Painter of North America. Toronto: Macmillan, 1934.

  Cameron, Elspeth, ed. Canadian Culture: An Introductory Reader. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1997.

  Catalogue of an Exhibition of Contemporary British Water Colours: Wood Engravings by Clare Leighton, A. R. E., Arctic Sketches by Lawren Harris and A. Y. Jackson, R. C. A., May 1931. Toronto: Gallery, 1931.

  Cavell, Edward, and Dennis R. Reid. When Winter Was King: The Image of Winter in 19th Century Canada. Banff, AB: Altitude Publishing and Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, 1988.

  Christensen, Lisa. A Hiker’s Guide to the Rocky Mountain Art of Lawren Harris. Calgary, AB: Fifth House, 2000.