Winter Read online

  THE MASSEY LECTURES SERIES

  The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former Governor General of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

  This book comprises the 2011 Massey Lectures, “Winter: Five Windows on the Season,” broadcast in November 2011 as part of CBC Radio’s Ideas series. The producer of the series was Philip Coulter; the executive producer was Bernie Lucht.

  ADAM GOPNIK

  Born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal, where he attended McGill University, Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than twenty-five years. In the magazine’s pages, his subjects have included new art, old books, good food, French manners, liberal rhet­oric, and family life. His collections of essays include Paris to the Moon, Angels and Ages, Through the Children’s Gate, and The Table Comes First. He has written two novels for children, The King in the Window and The Steps Across the Water, and, in collaboration with the composer David Shire, a musical comedy called Table. He lives in New York City with his wife, Martha Parker, and their two children, Luke and Olivia.

  ALSO BY ADAM GOPNIK

  NONFICTION

  Paris to the Moon

  Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York

  Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life

  The Table Comes First

  High And Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (with Kirk Varnedoe)

  CHILDREN’S FICTION

  The King in the Window

  The Steps Across the Water

  WINTER

  Five Windows on the Season

  ADAM GOPNIK

  Copyright © 2011 Adam Gopnik

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  This edition published in 2011 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

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  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Gopnik, Adam

  Winter : five windows on the season / Adam Gopnik.

  (CBC Massey lecture series)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN 978-1-77089-045-9

  1. Winter. I. Title. II. Series: CBC Massey lecture series

  QB637.8.G66 2011 508.2 C2011-903968-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011929922

  Cover design: Bill Douglas

  Cover photograph: Getty Images

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For Gudrun Bjerring Parker

  Filmmaker, feminist, lover of the world,

  woman of the north,

  who raised and loved and nurtured and then

  let go of my own true love,

  and, knowing too well how Demeter felt, never let her heart

  grow cold to the borrower.

  “Our envelope, as I have called it, the cultural insulation that separates us from nature, is rather like (to use a figure that has haunted me from childhood) the window of a lit-up railway carriage at night. Most of the time it is a mirror of our own concerns, including our concern about nature. As a mirror, it fills us with the sense that the world is something which exists primarily in reference to us: it was created for us; we are the centre of it and the whole point of its existence. But occasionally the mirror turns into a real window, through which we can see only the vision of an indifferent nature that goes along for untold aeons of time without us, seems to have produced us only by accident, and, if it were conscious, could only regret having done so.”

  — Northrop Frye, Creation and Recreation

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Part of the pleasure of the Massey Lectures, I’ve learned, is that they are published parallel with their delivery. This is a gift to the speaker, since it means that much of the work is done before the touring starts, and, for the hopelessly dilatory lecturer, the business of last-minute note-making becomes less frantic and wearing. But it’s also a challenge to those of us who have gained something over the years by being late with work, and whose practice has been to speak from notes, or even memory — partly, I suppose, as a stunt, but at least as a stunt like skydiving, albeit skydiving without a parachute and in desperate search of a haystack, must be one somewhere down there. What is lost in lucidity is made up for by bravado.

  Given that a lecture ought to be spoken, and that eventually I would speak these, I wanted for these essays a tone different from my well-varnished usual stuff, but that would still “work” for a reader as writing. I had, then, the idea of delivering a series of mock-Masseys the year before the real ones — five improvised living room lectures in the winter of 2010, one on each subject, supported by the cheer of wine and caffeine. These chapters are based on transcripts of those living room lectures, which I have, with some expert help, ironed and pressed and manicured and trimmed, but not, I think, entirely robbed of at least some of their spoken sound. I have eliminated the more irksome tics — all the “in facts” and “actuallys” and “so, basicallys” that occur more often than we know, and fear — but I haven’t entirely cured, or tried to cure, the slightly ragged and excited edges of the performance. (Spoken sentences, I’ve discovered, have a natural three-part rhythm: a statement, its expansion, and then its summary in simpler form.) These chapters are meant to sound vocal, and I hope that some of the sound of a man who has boned up on a subject — in several cases, just boned up — and is sharing the afternoon’s enthusiasm with an evening’s friends is still in place. I mention all this lest the reader think, experiencing the breathless rattle and crash of some of these sentences, that I simply did not notice that they sounded the way they sounded, or else for some reason was trying to create from scratch the sound of speech on the page, and failing at that.

  These are, then, the amended transcripts of lectures I once gave, designed to be the vocal templates of lectures I have yet to deliver. If there are paradoxes in this enterprise, it seems to suit the subject — which is, really, why winter, a season long seen as a sign of nature’s withdrawal from grace, has become for us a time of human warmth.

  So I have first and most to thank my listeners — Patty and Paul, Ariel and Alec and David, Becky and Emily, Leland and Aimee, and of course Martha and Luke and Olivia and even Butterscotch, who sat and chewed and wondered why — for bearing with me. There are more people thanked at the back of the book, but without those ears, it wouldn’t even have a front.

  A. G.

  New York

  June 2011

  ONE

  ROMANTIC WINTER

  The Season in Sight

  I recall my first snowstorm as though it were yesterday, though it was, as it happens, November 12, 1968. The snow began to fall just after three o’clock. I was home from s
chool, in an apartment at the old Expo site of Habitat ’67, above the St. Lawrence River, where my family had moved only months before.

  I had seen snow in America, of course, as a younger child in Philadelphia, but that snow was an event, a once-a-year wonder. This snow introduced itself — by its soft persistence and blanketing intensity, its too-soon appearance in the calendar (mid-November!) and the complacency with which everyone seemed to accept that too-soonness — as something that would go on for months and envelop a world. I stood behind the thin picture window that looked onto the terrace and I watched the first outline the world beyond, falling so it first italicized the plants and trees and the lights, drawing small white borders around them, and then slowly overwhelming them in drifts and dunes. I knew that I had crossed over into a new world — and that world was the world of winter.

  When I think back to my youth in Montreal, I still think first of winter. I think about cold, of course. I recall moments of walking in cold so bitter that your ears seemed to have turned into ice. (What had happened to my hat? What happens to the hats of all Canadian kids? They are lost to some vast repository of wool that will one day be recovered and used to re-clothe the sheep of the world.) Pain, certainly, and a sort of strange fugue state, wandering in what had looked like a big city street hours before but now, at ten below zero on the old scale, seemed as strange and abandoned and polar as any ice pack.

  But above all, my memories are of serenity. 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. This emotion has never left me. My heart jumps when I hear a storm predicted, even in the perpetual grisaille of Paris; my smile rises when cold weather is promised, even in forever-forty-something-Fahrenheit New York. Gray skies and December lights are my idea of secret joy, and if there were a heaven, I would expect it to have a lowering violet-gray sky (and I would expect them to spell gray g-r-e-y) and white lights on all the trees and the first flakes just falling, and it would always be December 19 — the best day of the year, school out, stores open late, Christmas a week away.

  Yet loving winter can seem, in the very long perspective of history, perverse. Of all the natural metaphors of existence that we have — light versus dark, sweet against bitter — none seems more natural than the opposition of the seasons: warmth against cold, spring against fall, and above all, summer against winter. Human beings make metaphors as naturally as bees make honey, and one of the most natural metaphors we make is of winter as a time of abandonment and retreat. The oldest metaphors for winter are all metaphors of loss. In classical myth, winter is Demeter’s sorrow at the abduction of her daughter by Death. In almost every other European mythology it is the same: winter is hard and summer is soft, as surely as sweet wine is better than bitter lees.

  But a taste for winter, a love for winter vistas — a belief that they are as beautiful and seductive in their own way, and as essential to the human spirit and the human soul as any summer scene — is part of the modern condition. Wallace Stevens, in his poem “The Snow Man,” called this new feeling “a mind of winter,” and he identified it with our new acceptance of a world without illusions, our readiness to live in a world that might have meaning but that doesn’t have God. A mind of winter, a mind for winter, not sensing the season as a loss of warmth and light, and with them hope of life and divinity, but ready to respond to it as a positive, and even purifying, presence of something else — the beautiful and peaceful, yes, but also the mysterious, the strange, the sublime — is a modern taste.

  Now, modern I mean in the sense that the loftier kinds of historians of ideas like to use the term, to mean not just right here and now but also the longer historical period that begins sometime around the end of the eighteenth century, breathes fire from the twin dragons of the French and Industrial Revolutions, and then still blows cinder-breath into at least the end of the twentieth century, drawing deep with the twin lungs of applied science and mass culture. An age of growth and an age of doubt, the age in which, for the first time in both Europe and America, more people were warmer than they had been before, and in which fewer people had faith in God — a period when, at last, the nays had it.

  My subject is the new feelings winter has provoked in men and women of those modern times: fear, joy, exhilaration, magnetic appeal and mysterious attraction. Since to be modern is to let imagination and invention do a lot of the work once done by tradition and ritual, winter is in some ways the most modern season — the season defined by absences (of warmth, leaf, blossom) that can be imagined as stranger presences (of secrets, roots, hearths). This new idea of winter races from the Gothic landscapes of the German Romantics to the lyrical snowfalls of the Impressionists, and from the city Christmas parables of Charles Dickens to the iceberg visions of Lawren Harris, and right on to Nat King Cole singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The mystique, the romance of winter is with Scott at the Pole as he eats his last “whoosh” and with Charlie Chaplin in the Yukon as he eats his own shoe.

  I won’t claim for these chapters anything like encyclopedic completeness, only an essayist’s idiosyncrasies: these are five windows among many more that we could open on the history of the winter mind. Yet though these chapters will not be hostage to a reductive thesis, they will hum, I hope, a recurrent theme. That theme is simply defined. Winter’s persona changes with our perception of safety from it — the glass of the window, as I sensed in that November snowstorm, is the lens through which modern winter is always seen. The romance of winter is possible only when we have a warm, secure indoors to retreat to, and winter becomes a season to look at as much as one to live through. For Henry James the two happiest words of nineteenth-century bourgeois civilization were “summer afternoon.” The answering two words that haunted the imagination of that same culture were “winter evening.”

  And I hope to make a larger point, larger even than helping you see that these two worlds — the world of the safe window and the world of the white wilderness outside — always in the end merge and become one in the modern mind. That is that there is a humane purpose to watching winter that is found simply in the acts of naming and describing. Winter is hard; the cold does chill; Demeter is mourning. And we oppose that threat with the quiet heroism of comfort. Central heating, double-paned windows, down coats, heated cars. But we also oppose the threatening blank bitterness of winter just by looking at it, and by saying what it’s like. The first thing that the earliest polar explorers did was to name the ice shelves and coasts — naming them after their patrons and their patrons’ moms — and then the very next thing the very next group of explorers did was to change the names, naming those same things after kaisers and their daughters. Names are the footholds, the spikes the imagination hammers in to get a hold on an ice wall of mere existence.

  The Adamic act, one might call it — not in light of this speaker but of that first Adam, whose entry-level job was to name the animals, calling a bear a bear and a snake a snake and then, in the last, expelled extreme, a lady a lady. Giving the animals names is to call them out of mere existence into mind. That act is the thing that makes the world humane. It gives structure and meaning to natural events that in themselves contain none. And it’s not just names in the literal sense that do this work; categories, insights, microscopic photographs, and meteorological predictions, concepts, distinctions — all work together to give a sweeter shape to what before was only scary. In the past two hundred years we have turned winter from something to survive to something to survey, from a thing to be afraid of to a thing to be aware of. It’s through the slow crawl of distinctions, differentiations, and explanations that the world becomes . . . well, never manageable, but recognizable, this place we know. The conquest of winter, as both a physical fact and an imaginative act, is one of the
great chapters in the modern renegotiation of the world’s boundaries, the way we draw lines between what nature is and what we feel about it. We see and hear and sense in winter emotional tones and overtones that our great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers did not. I hope to describe some of those newly made maps of winter feeling and tell you stories about the people — foolish and greedy and sometimes inspired — who redrew them.

  The biting strings and breathless beauty of Vivaldi’s “Winter,” from his Four Seasons of 1725, is a place to begin — though the more knowing of you probably cringe and grimace a little when you hear that name. Could anything be more inexorably middlebrow than this? Yet sometimes repetition can dull us to true greatness. (I suspect that if Vivaldi’s Seasons were dug out of a chest today and performed by a suitably sniffy German original-instruments group on a suitably obscure European label, it might be more easily recognized as the masterpiece it is.) Vivaldi’s “Winter” still sounds a clarion call. It’s among the very first articulations of an entirely new attitude about what winter is and offers. Vivaldi apparently wrote a poem for each of the four seasons. The one he wrote for winter describes all the harshness of winter, yet it ends in the same spirit as the music, saying “Ahh, what a scintillating time!” He wrote:

  To shiver, frozen, amid icy snow

  In the bitter blast of a horrible wind;

  To run constantly stamping one’s feet;

  And to feel one’s teeth chatter on account of the excessive cold;

  To spend restful, happy days at the fireside

  While the rain outside drenches a good one hundred

  To walk on the ice,

  And with slow steps to move about cautiously