It’s a scorching summer’s day and I’m midway through Winter when a text message arrives from friends holidaying in Germany. “It’s snowing. We had a spectacular train trip from Frankfurt to Bamberg. Blankets of snow everywhere and then the sun came out to make it even more beautiful. Christmas markets. Gluhwein and Christmas party for Jutta’s staff. What a day! Wish you were here.”
The book and the message transport me, so I’m flying down snow-covered slopes, bustling along twinkly streets with Christmas packages and watching from high windows as snowflakes fall in deep drifts.
“Romantic Winter” is the book’s first window (aka chapter) and author Adam Gopnik, who grew up in chilly Montreal, sets the scene with childhood reminiscence.
“My memories are of a rare feeling of perfect equanimity — standing on top of Mount Royal in the middle of Montreal on cross-country skis at five o’clock on a February evening, and feeling a kind of peace, an attachment to the world, an understanding of the world, that I had never had before.”
What shines through the next four windows is a melange of memory, history, philosophy and whimsy; a fascinating foray into winter as a season and modern idea.
As always with Gopnik, who is a New Yorker journalist and consummate essayist, the beauty is in the way he sweeps through diverse terrain and stitches together meaningful detail.
Winter’s chiaroscuro shows Charlie Chaplin in the extreme North elegantly eating his shoelaces, Wordsworth skating on a pond attracting admirers, Scott and his men in the Antarctic constructed by J. M. Barrie as “a missing troop of Peter Pan’s tribe”, a comparison of two iceberg poems — one by Elizabeth Bishop and the second by Randall Jarrell, the moral message of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and a theory that December 25 was a date randomly chosen in the fourth century so that “whatever it is we’re celebrating [at Christmas] it’s not the birth of Jesus of Nazareth” .
Other interesting observations include:
- Gopnik quoting Australia’s Dr Karl (Karl Kruszelnicki), who says snowflakes start out more or less the same but are altered in their descent to become more individual as they fall.
- Gopnik’s love of ice hockey and his “clan”, the Montreal Canadiens. He says he has an “ache for a higher craft” in this oftentimes violent, thuggish sport.
- Reference to a fiery debate in the early 19th century in Germany among poets and scientists about whether eisblumen (“ice flowers” growing on windows) were living forms “made by the hand of God” or were mimicry. Goethe believed the latter and pronounced that people could not have faith in ice flower patterns on windows as they were “signs of death not life”.
- Revelations that a smaller, shorter ice age occurred between 1550 and 1850 after which the discovery of abundant coal gave rise to the Romantic imagination. Ergo: The romance of winter is only possible because we (middle classes) have a warm place indoors to retreat to.
There is much talk in the book of winter as a place of danger, longed-for adventure, magical memory and deep-set loss.
For example, in examining Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, Gopnik concludes that, “What makes the Snow Queen so alluring is that she sits — reigns — between two traditions: the classical Christian idea of the North as bad, dangerous, to be escaped, and the Romantic idea of the wintry North as alluring, seductive, to be followed. The mirror of reason was always broken. Winter is a trap for the Romantic imagination, because it makes dead forms look as nice as living ones. The Snow Queen looks terrific, but she’ll freeze your soul.”
The source of Andersen’s allegorical, mythical fable, Gopnik says, is “that actual, real, tangible, pit-of the-stomach sensation that time has somehow stood still even as the snow falls …”
At every point, however, reality tempers the dream. Time does not stop. The winter snows always melt.
These truths cascade as Gopnik outlines a litany of facts and fears related to global warming and which add weight to his most serious point: Winter, itself, is under threat of disappearing.
A graphic illustration he gives of this is how polar bears are turning to cannibalism as the warming of their prey’s traditional habitat is depleting the bears’ natural food supply.
Human excess is to blame for this.
Winter grew out of the week-long Massey Lectures Gopnik gave in 2011. He tweaked the lectures for print and added colour plates of winter art to illustrate his points.
Two of Gopnik’s previous books, Through the Children’s Gate and Paris to the Moon, rank high in my non-fiction favourites — so read these two books first and then read Winter for a triple treat.
Gopnik’s sleigh-ride through crystalline worlds is exhilarating. It won’t disappoint.
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