Five Windows on the Season
by Adam Gopnik
CBC Massey Lecturer, and American moved to Montreal (Habitat 67), living in NYC
First Thematic Note: Romantic Winter: bleak and bitter to sweet and sublime
Second Note: Radical Winter: how words get woven around Arctic expeditions
Third Note: Recuperative Winter: how the secularization of Christmas invented a new idea of sacred
Fourth Note: Recreational Winter: a chance to talk at length about hockey
Fifth note: Remembering Winter:sweetness made from stress
REVIEW:
This book was the perfect read for this snowy January. Although I would have enjoyed it a little more cleaned up, I respect the writer’s desire to mimic a conversation, and his use of a small group recording to capture this free flow.
I loved the reflection on how we have come to romanticize winter (since the advent of reliable indoor heating), how we have foolishly pushed the limits of cold in futile adventures to the poles but continue to admire these traits, how the Christmas season evolved, how winter sports became a important focus, and how our memories of winter will change, especially in light of global warming.
The works of art he chose and included in the center of the book, are wonderfully representative of his themes. Many of them were familiar, and all of them are evocative.
A book worth reading on cold days under a cozy blanket.
ROMANTIC WINTER
Vivaldi’s Winter of his Four Seasons 1725
Sirocco, Boreas, winds at war
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
Poet William Cowper The Winter Evening 1785 « fireside enjoyments »
Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge goes walking in Germany »What sublime scenery »
Edmund Burke on the sublime and the beautiful - that beauty is multifaceted and spans the entirety of human sympathy- not just the perfect, or safe, or comfortable. That dangerous, imperfect, uncomfortable things are beautiful too, even winter.
In 19th century, sublime was used for everything!
Picturesque represents pretty cozy nature. Sublime covers scary, awe-inspiring nature.
German Romantics
Painter Caspar David Friedrich (painting on the Baltic island of Rügen) - lost his 13 year old brother in a skating accident falling through the ice to drown
1819 Monastery Graveyard in the Snow, Chasseur in the Forest, Sea of Ice 1824
German, Romantic resistance to the Enlightenment’s idea of reason, French army
Winter is the red pill of the matrix, an awakened northern consciousness, scary winter is bitter, but the truth. The matrix is the blue pill, sweet winter, but a lie
Winter, the sleep of nature, brings forth imagination.
Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen 1845
The hero, Kay, gets a chip of glass in his eye (from an evil goblin’s mirror ) and it distorts his vision. He sees a snowflake, and its intricate internal form, and thinks it’s more beautiful than a flower. The Snow Queen sits in the middle fo a broken Mirror of Reason, and represents someone who confuses cold death with warm life. She reigns between the classical Christian idea of a bad, dangerous north, to be escaped and the romantic idea of an alluring, seductive north.
Composer Franz Schubert Winterreise
Eisblumen (hoarfrost) - Goethe and Knebel, friends, debate about whether the patterns of « ice flowers » that develop on the window were the hand of God, or just crystals. Goethe scientifically felt that they were not alive, so they were not real. As a form of mimicry, he saw them as dead, and not romantic.
Impressionists like Lauren Harris’ icebergs and mountains
Russia and Canada are places that cannot escape winter. When Napoleon is defeated in the campaign of 1812 by Russian winter, the patriots appreciate for the first time its poetic nature.
Prince Piotr Vyazemsky writes First Snow, as though it was a first love. His best friend Alexander Pushkin writs Winter Morning, and notes the paradox of winter (winter impedes, but also makes possible an accelerated travel). New roads not possible in spring and fall, are frozen and passable, making sleigh travel possible, with furs and secrets and eroticism only possible by the winter season.
Christmas Parables by Charles Dickens
This window of winter is « exterior », looking from inside out.
RADICAL WINTER
Extreme opposite to summer - Winter evening vs Summer afternoon
Demeter is in mourning for her daughter, kidnapped and taken to the underworld by Hades
Before central heating and other modern conveniences, winter was survived. It was scary. It was uncomfortable.
Ice age 50,000 years ago
1550-1850 Europe’s mini »ice-age »
White Christmas is the norm in 18th century literature, Holland’s canals froze over
Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour Lost « when icicles hang »
Dr Samuel Johnson The Winter’s Walk 1747
The sober neoclassical Augustine view of winter - impressive but fundamentally negative
Frankenstein, Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Lewis’ Hunting of the Snark (Bellman’s map, Boojum )- allude to the foolhardy attempts for the Northwest passage (WASP existential test, « no point to it but the point of doing it ») of Franklin and Scott (The Worst Journey of the World « Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and the most isolated way of having a bad time which has yet to be devised »), Cook « Alfred Dreyfus of the North, and Peary (supported by the National Geographic Society)
South Pole - Scott (Lawrence Oates »I am just going outside and may be some time »), Shackleton
Greenland’s Inuit (called Eskimo highlanders, by the British)- used three meteorites - the Tent, the Woman, the Dog - for tools - Robert Peary took them and sold them to NYC Natural history museum
RECUPERATIVE WINTER
Winter solstice -Roman Saturnalia(Jupiter’s banished father, Kronos), Roman Kalends, Yule, festivals of light, Jan 6th epiphany
Reversal Feasts - Halloween
Renewal Feasts - Thanksgiving, July 4th
Christmas is a compound festival - sacred at the 25th, reversal at Yule/Cinder claus - lump of coal - Jesus born to die
Mythology of modern Christmas - Northern protestants - in response to Puritans banishing Christmas(17th C London), Plymouth attempts fail
Mass urban poverty 1830s1840s - political reform responses: liberal economist John Stuart Mill, revolution by Marx and Engels - brought on romantic heroic leadership
Dickens A Christmas Carol - Trollope spoofs with a Jewish secular holiday
Thomas Nast NY cartoonist Santa Claus illustration 1862
union army « The South has chivalry, but we have Santa »
post civil war rise of commercialism
1867 Macy’s open to midnight (Enchanted Forest, Ogilvy’s)
1871 Carols, cards, official holiday Britain and USA
Victorian German traditions of Yule
1914 Christmas truce on the Western Front
1940 psychological literature notes the conflict of hope and hopelessness
1944 musical WHAuden’s For the Time Being
1946 Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life
Tension between the material and the spiritual Christmas; secular and sacred
RECREATIONAL WINTER
Johann Strauss’ Skater’s Waltz (https://youtu.be/isvt802U8BY)
Dutch become royals in 1600s, and the Thames freezes for the winter in 1689, bringing skates to England
Skating as movement
Skating as social- “a carved-out social space in which we find ourselves alone”, requiring common preparation, but then performed alone
Skating as sexy, “sport as an alternative to sex”
Figure skating invented by Jackson Haines, accepted first in Europe, including music, jumps, spins, arabesques, and pirouettes (England school of skating and America’s lack of arenas were factors
Britain had a “military” style called “combination skating”, resulting in “international style” as it exists today, and English style, which has been lost to us
Team sports, and spectator sports became popular agains in the last half of the 19th century, with golf, football, and baseball championships starting in the 1860s.
Sponsors from department stores, factories,and newspapers begin.
Labour solidarity allowed for weekends, so teams could play Fridays and Sundays.
Olympic amateurism is sponsored by Baron Coubertin, with a common cause; rebound Romanticism; tending to morality, discipline, militarism, anti-sexual, purity, renewal, social engagement.
Team sports are a complex balance between solidarity and rivalry. Where politics highlight social difference and aim to end it, sports dramatic use social difference and tries to perpetuate it, creating tribal passions with a parody of war, but played for fun.
*Ernest Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star during WWI about winter sports, using vocabulary for luge and sledding that will end up informing his writing about the bullfight
Hockey invented by an NS raised engineer (Creighton) in Montreal with the Grand Trunk Railroad to extend rugby into the winter season. The first large rink in Canada was the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, sitting between Drummond and Stanley. Hockey became a hybrid of sport, and association; with team play, self-policing, and violence; a collision combination of control sports (like football) and collision sports (like rugby).
Two solitudes: English and French, Prosperous Scottish (McGill) and Pious Roman Catholic, Sun Life (Dominion) building, St Joseph’s Oratory. The Irish were English AND Roman Catholic, so the hockey teams were a trio, with the Irish switching between the two others. McGill Redmen, and Montagnards and Shamrocks (Point St Charles).
Open information game-both sides see the same thing eg chess, basketball
Closed information game- surprise matters eg poker, football ?hockey
Team sports- Clan vs craft sport
Spatial intelligence- Wayne Gretzky credited for “seeing the ice”
Sports fan- “pitiful vicarious identification”
REMEMBERING WINTER
Vernalisation- refers to seeds- thriving in spring depends on survival through a cold winter
Winter stress makes summer sweetness
Joni Mitchell River(Blue) -Aden Bowman, Saskatoon, sang around campfires at Waskesiu
“Winter adds depth and darkness to life as well as to literature…a culture based on joy is bound to be shallow.” Derek Walcottt Nobel acceptance speech
“Winter-the dead season, the off-season, the bleak season in which we store our own sense of the past.”
Three losses-
1 Being removed by climate control, technology, architecture
2 Objectively, by global warming
3 Winter and the idea of its memory
Paris rinks “ice palace”
”juking” from school
“Winter cities movement” -includes Montreal’s underground city - visionary planner American emigre Vincent Ponte (immortalized at Place Ville Marie)- over 20 miles long, sixty separate real estate complexes (some public some private, ten metro stations, two commuter rail stations and two regional bus stations, 2000 stores, 2000 housing units, 200 restaurants, banks, movie theater, convention centres
Pointe and I M Pie came to Montreal as architects in 1959 at developer Zeckendorf’s urging to rebuild the gash left by building the railway
In 1961, the “second city” underground started, with the assurance that every thing underground would be public, and networked together with a below grade train. A pedestrian city. Montrealers have a choice between a winter city or an underground one.
In Canada, unlike, USA, digging underground is not owned by the building above it, but by the government of Canada unless a treaty is in place.
City Lights: A Street Life - a memoir by Keith Waterhouse - walking around Leeds in the 1930s
Jane Jacobs - urban philosopher - cities are self-organizing
In the Middle Ages, Jewish synagogues were not allowed to be built higher that church steeples, so they dug down.
Ponte designed a similar underground city in Dallas, which failed (not based on subways, people traveling in cars don’t go underground in the same way, and above ground doesn’t exist in the same way)
Past the tipping point -2007-Frost above the Arctic circle couldn’t keep up with the melt of summer
Polar bears turn to cannibalism in face of the loss of ice
Coastal communities being displaced
2005 Sheila Watt-Cloutier presented to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights - polluters are violating others “right to be cold”
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