Skip to main content

The indignities of winter

- Sunset at 4pm
- the third cold in two months
- unshuttable windows and meager heating device
- thus frigid bedroom
- thus arthritic fingers
- cold toilets & showers
- not enough jumpers
- constant hunger
- hibernation instincts
- sense of the isolation of mankind
- belief in imminent destruction of the planet by comets
- walking around with an unchanging grimace



Who are these people who talk about crystalline walks in nature? And the minute perfection of frost patterns on windows? I’d like to know. I’d make them spend a night in my freezer – I mean room. Consolation: mulled wine.

Comments

I hear ya, it's been snowing here since Friday (or did this mess start on Thursday night? I forget.) It doesn't look like it's going to stop this week...already over a foot of snow, another 5-9 inches due today and another 5-9 by tomorrow morning and more throughout the day tomorrow...Upstate New York winter up to its old tricks, Lake Ontario is the snow machine...it seems I can't get warm enough. (Dang, where's a hot flash when I need one?) I try to make the best of it by wearing lots of layers and taking pictures of what's out there in the winter wonderland.
Aleksandra said…
I am! I'm one of those naive dreamers who stop to look for (obviously un)identical snowflakes in -15 C!
And I have a broken heater, too, so I'm sitting in 2 and a half jumpers and two pairs of socks right now. But I will find magic anywhere.

Thank you for your blog. It is not only a good read and a pleasure for the eye, but it (well, you) also encourage me not to chicken out and pursue my dreams and apply to UK for my MA.
Ian Wolcott said…
Comets never seem so likely as they do in a wet December.
Ian, I agree. L & A, now that winter is really and truly here (and I have a heater) I've decided to convert to winter wonderlandedness. And Aleksandra, you should definitely go for the MA. (And thanks for reading!)

Popular posts from this blog

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
Attention poetry mavens: any suggestions for good contemporary poets (either in general or particular collections)? Have sudden appetite but very little idea where to start. Any advice welcome!

When the Lights Go Out

Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man is nothing less than a modern masterpiece and, I have no doubt, will turn out to be one of my favorite books of 2010. The novel follows George as he struggles through a single day in 1960’s Los Angeles following the death of his lover. George wakes up, goes to the university where he teaches literature, goes to the gym, has dinner with a friend, gets drunk at a dive bar, swims in the ocean, and arrives at the end. George is “three quarters human,” a machine trying to keep himself alive until it is time not to be. Like an actor, he is absent from humanity. When he looks at his neighbors, at the suburban families, he thinks "They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flash-lamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gordon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinki...