Winter

by Adam Gopnik

  That sense still filters into our contemporary polar art and winter poetry. Not courage but the claustrophobia of safety and the too-oft-repeated history of lost lore haunt our hearts. There is, for instance, a fine recent memoir by the British writer Jenny Diski, called Skating to Antarctica. Published in 1997, it’s about a trip to the Antarctic, counterpoised with a memoir of her parents and of her parents’ miserable marriage. But what’s significant is that the Antarctic is no longer a symbol of exploration, of going beyond, of the unknown, the unknowable. Just the opposite: it’s a symbol of confinement, a background for claustrophobia; it represents the bad memories we can’t escape and the buried life that drags us down. When Diski goes to the South Pole, she knows just where she is going — and she knows that the essential challenge it will present to her is just to get through it.

  It may seem a long reach from the cheerful burrows of underground retailing to these sad polar prose poems. But they evoke in us a common intuition that our withdrawal from winter fear brings with it a numbing of winter feeling. As safety grows, the sense of the seasons flees from us. A sense of security is excellent for civic capital, bad for sensibilities. This sense that even a polar voyage in the dead of winter is perfectly comfortable, but newly narrow, seems evocative of the limits of our lives. It has less to do with fear and the physical compression of fear, and more to do with the boredom of life lived in a sterile environment.

  The world was once haunted by Titus Oates’s self-made epitaph: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Well, we are going inside and may be some time; we are inside, and have been for a while. The poetry of courage is replaced by the poetry of confinement, the art of the endless open channel overtaken by the art of the perpetually retold tale. Our successful withdrawal from the risks of winter makes for a lessening of its intensities. We have all gone inside, and may be some time.

  These winter losses are emotional — spiritual, if you like to elevate them, “merely” aesthetic and architectural if you intend to deprecate them. Yet surely this sense of loss is deepened and made more urgent by our knowledge that winter might be lost to us, that winter is something that is simply disappearing.

  For the other, bigger loss that has us remembering rather than experiencing winter is real and hard-edged. Obviously I’m thinking about the desolation of the North and the coming of man-caused climate change, and with it the actual loss of winter. This threat — perhaps, now, this inalterable fact — has been articulated and itemized far more frighteningly and effectively by others than I can hope to do now. The catalogue of what we stand to lose, in cities swamped and icebergs melting and environments irrevocably altered, has all been written about and prophesied.

  The literature on global warming and the North is complex and immense, but several recent books put the phenomenon — or catastrophe — in sharp journalistic perspective. My brother-in-law, Edward Struzik, the Arctic writer and explorer, is the man in our family who actually goes out and looks at these places, where most of us stay home and talk about them. Edward has itemized all the fears and all the possibilities of the loss of winter very eloquently in his book The Big Thaw.

  Although I’m sure the threat and the fears of the coming of global warming are present in the forefront of all our minds, let me just itemize a few things. Melting ice sheets in the Arctic are already adding one hundred cubic miles of ice to the oceans. That means that by the end of the century — this century — the millions of people who live within three feet of sea level may all have to move, possibly including the entire island of Manhattan. There seems already to be no stopping the advance of the treeline into the vast tundra regions of the Arctic. You recall how I talked in the second chapter about how you can experience winter as a fundamentally spatial phenomenon, one that begins at about the treeline every summer and then fights its way like a Civil War general farther and farther into the south, and then goes back up? Well, that treeline, behind which winter has always hidden, is now extending farther and farther north; it seems likely now there will be spruce trees within the Arctic Circle and on the Arctic islands in the next quarter-century. The exile of First Nations peoples from low-lying shores is already taking place: five coastal communities are already being evacuated. We may already have passed a Gladwellian tipping point: in 2007, for the first time, the frost of winter above the Arctic Circle could no longer keep up with the melt of summer. The anticipation now is that the Arctic will be seasonally free of ice not in fifty years, as people feared only ten years ago, but in something more like five years.

  The facts, and their images, are all terrifying, but the one that I think is most redolent with the sense of catastrophic change is that polar bears are now taking to cannibalism. As temperatures warm and the habitat of their traditional prey vanishes, polar bears are eating other polar bears. And somewhere soon along this loop, the tundra will start heating up as the permafrost melts and all the carbon escapes; instead of being a great cooling force in nature, the tundra will become one more source of warmth. We may not be coming to the end of the planet, but we may truly be coming — and sooner than we might expect — to the end of winter as we have known it.

  The human response to this threat, to this sense of the loss of winter, is already taking place. In 2005 Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the Canadian Inuit activist, coined a startling phrase and presented it before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights: what was being violated, she said, by the polluters who were causing the world to warm, was “the right to be cold.” This phrase, strange-sounding or even comical to southerners, does point out an ethical imperative. It insists that one of the fundamental human rights for all people who live in northern climates is the right to be cold, exactly because their culture cannot go on in its absence. As we warm the world, entire peoples are being deprived of their weather, a right as fundamental as a seafaring nation’s right to access the ocean, or a Venetian’s right to be wet. That phrase may put a smile on the lips of those of us who are plenty cold enough already without asserting a right to be so forever, but the sense of cultural dislocation that it sums up, that sense of a total remaking of our expectations — not just of what life is like but of what nature is like, what the planet is like — is real and radical and profound.

  The end of winter! Of course, it’s likely that these prophecies will not come wholly true, because that is the usual way with prophecies, or it may very well be that they will come true in ways we cannot yet imagine — just possibly for the better, more likely for much worse. (One possible twist in the story of climate change is that it will make for more severe rather than less severe winters down here in the once-tempered seasons.) But that we will lose much of the familiar physical world and its familiar fixed cycles seems likely, perhaps certain.

  I can’t speak with any expertise to that, except to say that people who spend their lives going to see what’s happening all say that it’s going to happen. But I can speak to another, lesser, but in its way more immediate kind of loss — a cultural loss, or, if you like, an aesthetic one, in the higher sense that all our choices beyond the merely animal are finally aesthetic. If winter passes, or if it changes radically, the world will adjust. But will we? Conceivably a world without winter might even in the very long run be a greener place. But Demeter without her mourning is someone else; she inhabits a more facile and fatuous planet.

  For the idea and imagery of winter has long been bound up with our ideas of memory and the past. We will not lose our sense of these things, of course, if winter changes, any more than those who live in torrid climates have lost theirs. But the apparatus, the affect, the folklore, the mythology of memory and the mineral world will go — the feel of the thing will alter, and we will ask where the snows of yesterday went all the time, and forever. Without our memory of winter, the North, the snow, the seasonal cycle, something will be lost to our civilization too, a loss as grave in its way as that of the Inuit.

  It
is hard not to be haunted at this moment in history by that heartbreaking story of the Greenland Inuit’s loss of their three meteorites — the Tent, the Woman, and the Dog, from which for centuries they wrought their knives and harpoons — at the hands of the American explorer Robert Peary, who sold them to the natural history museum in my adopted city of New York for forty thousand dollars. I’ve said that the tale of the three clans in Montreal would make the great Canadian film; well, this story would make the great northern Schubertian song cycle, if anyone still wrote such things. I often go to look at the three meteorites now and touch their cool surfaces. It seemed to the people who stole them — well, bought and sold them — a neat enough bit of imperial collecting. Now it surely seems an act of cultural vandalism as cruel as any on record. The Greeks who lost the Parthenon frieze had other friezes to keep. It is true that afterwards the Inuit would find trading for iron far easier. But the meteorites were theirs — their place, their legend. The fact of the Woman and the Tent and the Dog was central to the Inuit sense of who they were. When the stones were hauled away, the necessary useful acts were no longer tied to a cosmic purpose, or even, to our more knowing eyes, a happy cosmic accident. They were only what they were. In every sense, their stones were what bound them to the stars.

  Well, the seasons are our three (or four) meteorites. We chip at them for our history. The relationship between winter and memory is complex and can seem inarticulate, something sensed more than spoken, so let me try to unwrap a few of those connections here. First there’s a simple biological sense, in which winter holds the past in place: roots and tubers that are buried throughout the winter months have their genetic memory locked within them, tied up within them, waiting to bloom again. That simple botanical fact has become a much richer cultural idea in the hands of those like Caspar David Friedrich and Franz Schubert and Alexander Pushkin, who found national memory there. That idea of national memory may have its sinister shadings, but the notion that the true character of the Germans or the Scandinavians or the Russians — or the Canadians — was suddenly revealed in winter was a rich counter-Enlightenment idea, one at the heart of the Romantic rebellion against arid reason. Everybody has got a warm summer, but we in the North have a winter, and we know ourselves and see ourselves best then. It was a big idea. And that idea of memory presses deep, extending from racial or national memory to planetary memory among the glaciologists, and memories of the Nativity as we imagine it to be — or merely of childhood as we had hoped it might be — among the makers of modern Christmas. Sports too are memory bound — the next period, the season’s statistics.

  Yet there are two different ways in which winter touches memory: there is memory in winter and memory of winter. In the first sense we use winter as a blank slate, the place where everything is scrubbed away. From the most mystical German vision to the most obvious folk use, winter is the climate of the imagination. Winter displaces us from the normal cycles of nature — nothing’s growing — and with our disjunction from nature comes our escape into the mind, which can make of nature what it will. We talked before about how snow and ice, the elements of winter, are all immensely labile. And one of the things that the Romantic imagination from Coleridge onwards seized on is this ability we have to project our dreams onto winter forms, to see in the frozen lake that Coleridge glimpsed in 1799 the forms of the Israelites parting the Red Sea.

  At a simple, practical, everyday level, that’s our experience of building a snowman. That’s why we send our children out on the first day of a snowstorm — exactly because they are in a newly labile environment where the imagination can not only project but can construct anew from something given. We see the world through the lens of the window, and even when the window is not frosted — remember the great debates between Goethe and his contemporaries about the meaning of hoarfrost? — it still has two sides, one for the world and one for our mind. Start with snow and a snowman is what you’ll get. A snow day, in the simplest sense, is a day a child spends outside normal time.

  And in each of the great winter fables and in all of the great winter art, we’ve glimpsed again and again a more sublime version of that temptation of timelessness. Think again of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” Think about how the seductive power of the Snow Queen for Kay is that she offers him immortality of a sort — not immortality through endlessly renewed youth, but immortality in the possibility of stopping time completely. That’s what happens when Kay goes to live with the Snow Queen and forgets everything that made him human — it’s the ability to stop time dead that she gives him. And that timelessness is related to the eternity of mineral life. At that very moment, in the company of the Snow Queen, the snowflake, its crystalline form, looks far more beautiful to Kay than natural, organic forms. The snowflake looks more beautiful than a flower. At that moment he potentially escapes from the cycles of natural time into a timeless world, represented by the Snow Queen and the winter empire she superintends. Winter keeps us forever frozen.

  Now, Andersen has Gerda rescue Kay from his false rejection of organic life, with its cycles of growth and decay; that’s why they’ll get married. But the possibility of entering a timeless world represented by winter is exactly the temptation that Andersen wants us to feel. Of course, in Andersen’s hands this notion becomes an entirely mystical — if you like, allegorical — construction. But it’s an allegorical construction that is rooted, I think, in our actual, immediate experience of what it is like to live through a cold winter. It’s exactly that sensation, that feeling of potential serenity and escape, that I knew at twelve years old, watching the endless snows fall outside on a late November day in Montreal. It’s that actual, real, tangible, pit-of-the-stomach sensation that time has somehow stood still even as the snow falls that is the ultimate source of this beautiful, al­legorical, mythical fable.

  The second sense of memory and winter involves not memory working within winter but our memory of winter, after it is over. The snows of winter become the tangible sands of the memory clock. Summer, and tropical islands, supplies the illusion of same time over and over — the “day of our life” we once had — and of the warm, good place we once lived and were made to leave. Winter and cold places instead supply, I think, a sense of past time, and an urge to think about time passing. We use winters as our clock. Où sont les neiges d’antan? Once again there’s a simple root, everyday sense in which memory is keyed by, set off by the coldest season. We set our inner clocks by the storms we’ve known. I know 1968 by the snow it brought. We recall the storm of ’87, the storm of ’61 — a snowstorm marks our memory, in a way that a seaside only vaguely casts a shadow over our minds. What year did that happen? The summers all bleed together. What year was the Forum closed and the car covered over by snow for four days? Ah, that was the storm of ’96.

  This core common sense can be raised to art. It’s one you find all over twentieth-century literature, as in the beautiful moment in The Great Gatsby when, after the disillusionment of Nick Carraway’s summer in Manhattan, he remembers — the thing he chooses to remember from all his experience — the moment when, coming home from college for Christmas, he changed trains in Chicago to go to St. Paul. It’s exactly the moment of escape from the corruption of the East to enter the remembered winters of the West, which represent the possibility of purification, the possibility of recuperation, the possibility of recovery. Intertwining the idea of winter, the representation of winter, with the idea of memory and the idea of restoration is, I think, an enormously powerful theme in modern art.

  Or just look at the movies, and particularly the best black-and-white movies of the 1940s. In cinema there is no more powerful metaphor for recapturing lost time than the idea of remembered winter. With Orson Welles, of course, it takes an almost kitsch form in Citizen Kane, when the one thing that can revivify the dying tycoon’s life is the memory of his sled. It’s done much more beautifully in his The Magnificent Ambersons: the snow scene
becomes the one place where the onrushing modern­ity of the car is stilled and held off for a brief time. Winter is even more effectively present in Max Ophüls’ beautiful film Letter from an Unknown Woman, where the lovers are finally able to break into the Prater, an amusement park in Vienna, in the dead of winter and recapture a piece of their lost youth in this otherwise abandoned and snow-covered fairground. “Genius,” Nabokov once wrote, “resembles an African imagining snow.” And memory, he might have added, looks like an amusement park in winter.

  Though our setting for all these essays has been winter, our true subject has been time. We share a sense of a timeless winter, of eternal winter, of winter as the place where time stands still, the poles as places permanently outside our dailyness, the snow as nature’s secret — all this is at the heart of the idea of winter in the modern mind. Christmas comes but once a year, but the cycle of renewal it celebrates promises to set us free of aging. We look at something as simple as the skaters in Central Park and we see that the particulars of a period — of time passing, fashion changing — seep into their image in a way that it might not if we were writing a cultural history of summer, with summer’s ideals of unchanging weather and the summer island’s promise of perma­nent lull. Winter is our nostalgic moment, and nostalgia is just the vernacular of history, the demotic of memory, the slang of time.

  Winter, in seeming to end the cycles of fertility, offers the promise of escape from time’s cycle, of which the seasonal cycle is merely an expression. Deep, deep in winter ritual and winter myth is the idea of this escape: in “The Snow Queen,” where the “dead” forms of crystals are as alive as the living forms of flowers; in the chosen monasticism of the polar expeditions, where escape from news — we are at war! — is part of the pleasure; even in the transformation of Santa Claus from an avatar of old Father Time to an ageless wild man of the North Pole, industrialist and imp at the same time. In all these myths and moments winter has been our clock, and winter has supplied the setting for the theatre of our memory. Lose winter and we won’t lose our sense of these things, any more than those who live in torrid climates, as I said, have lost theirs. Summer does not bring amnesia — but it symbolizes it, as winter does memory. The feel of the thing will alter, and we will all ask with François Villon where the old snows went, and why they’ve gone forever.