Snow

That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow to him, that mortal man cannot be true…The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. ‘All is vanity’, ALL…There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar. 

-  Herman Meville’s Moby-Dick, from Chapter XCVI ‘The Try-Works’

In a thousand ways man is outshone by nature. To say nobility has vanished from our society is an understatement of the vastest proportions. ‘Chivalry is dead’ is a cultural cliché, yet what cliché is not founded in some truth? In wintertime, the wasteland that has become our popularly vaunted suburbia is made clearer by the distinction which snow presents. Blanket the earth in a uniform whiteness and all our created wickedness vanishes; the temperature slips into the 40’s and we are left with a poignant reminder of the pure fetidness that is the legacy of our race.

Imagine that, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Tramalfadorians, you have the power to see all of time at once, not as a linear line, but as a swirling globe. You see the world as it is, as it will be, as it once was. Virgin forest and open prairies blending seamlessly into gas stations and ratridden apartment buildings. You see these generations of bespoiling, of beauty and nobility fouled for the sake of base convenience and veneers of class. Cement and brick replace oak and rock, chemical filth and gasoline replace soil and grass. Perhaps then the truth of our condition would be made plain. How celebrated would cities be, were we forced to constantly contemplate their genesis? A knot twists my stomach every time I hear someone speak of the beauty of a metropolis; and when pressed for the source of that beauty they have nothing more than geometrical symmetry, or human accomplishment, to justify their statement. Yet when a man is beaten to death and the bloodmarks that pock his face happen to fall in a pleasing geometrical alignment, even though that deed has been accomplished by humans, we do not deign his passing with the adjective beauty. So seem cities to me.

The sun renders truth over the earth, laying plain the waste we have wreaked upon the land we have been given. Troll through a city and see the oily wastelands, the filthy back alleys, the trashstrewn walkways, the smogged out atmospheres circulating above our freeways and between our towers. During a snowfall these verities are hidden, obscured, veneered by nature's freeze to appear uniform and in following with the universe's plan. Snow can make even a rusty old trashcan appear beautiful; almost no one will not admit that to be true.

Yet is it really because this white frozen moisture is so beautiful, that even the dullest and most vapid of individuals remark upon its glory? Certainly to environmentalists, or contemplative people of deep thought, there is that silent nobility to snow, the hush which it carries over the earth, the simple and quiet way which it commands whole societies to a halt, as if urging the world to step back from the onesound of suburbia, to stop and to listen, nothing more. Yet in our age of the iPerson, of instant gratification, or perpetual impatience, of ceaseless lethargy, could this deeper sacrosanctity of snow be said to be broadly reckoned? More likely by far do these finer details go unnoticed. So then what is it about snow which makes even the masses of idiots, even the Tom Bradys and the Sarah Palins and the Perez Hiltons of the world, stop and marvel at the winter wonderland?

And we cannot forget the nature of snow. Each snowflake is uniquely individual, yet countless trillions of flurries come together to form a perfectly coordinated, and harmonically blanketed, whole. Snow and society rest at the farthest polar extremes; we are a world of disjointed masses who easily and greedily fall prey to conformity, yet instead of the grace of a snowy landscape, we come together to produce the epic disharmony of a polluted metropolis. From nature, if nowhere else, should mankind learn the futility of order, the imperfect chaos that is the fate of anything artificial in this ignoble world. Humans are like snowflakes, born from a chance encounter between opposite elements, floating beautiful and innocent through their early lives, untouched by the powers of the social earth. Each is somehow entirely unique, different from the next, bearing different shapes, consistencies, characteristics. And each is fated to join the larger whole. When the snowflake does so it is merely a stage of development, a stepping stone to seamlessly and joyfully join the greater community. A collective of individuals in perfect accord, this is what the world could be. But the transition of an infant to an adult, a snowflake to a blanket, is the corruption of innocence, the assimilation of individuality; a process which our world deems necessary for progress. And so we turn a blind eye to the model for utopia which winter offers us up, free of charge.

It took me many years to realize that my joy for snow was much more than the ecstasy of having off school. It took a few more years after that to realize that snow, like rain, made me happy because it was different, and I liked things that were different because I was bored by, and generally did not approve of, life as it was being presented to me. And it has only been the last few winters that I understood, on a deeper level, what snow actually does: it transforms our plain, boring, often disgusting metropolises into wonderlands and wildernesses of adventure. Cars cease to pollute the streets; fortitude, not gas money, is required to travel. The constant reminders that adventure is impossible, that there can be no journey or voyage of danger to be undertaken, vanish into clouds of puffy white freeze. Freedom to be challenged by something made by god, rather than something made by man, seems within reach. And most importantly, all the brutal ugliness of the world is hidden from sight. And it is this last feature of a snowstorm which, consciously or subconsciously, appeals to just about every living citydweller on the face of the planet. Even dumb brutes have some base aesthetic sense, whether they like to admit it or not. Even the movers and shakers, builders and planners of our filthiest cities recognizes the comfort of that deception, though whether they know they are being deceived, or care to know so, is another matter entirely.



Song of the Day: Dog Days are Over by Florence and the Machine. An anthem to a coming storm!