Becoming More Yourself As You Descend

 

“I wish I had a river I could skate away on…..”

Me too, and I have never liked skating (I’m bad at it and it hurts my ankles) which tells you something about the force of that line from Joni Mitchell’s long-ago song, River, about Christmas in Los Angeles. She’d grown up in Saskatchewan, which must have the kind of winters that are close to unimaginable, and the song is certainly about memory and homesickness, but also about something more than that (homesickness is curable, after all—you just go home and when you get there you remember why you left in the first place).

It’s also about displacement, about the sense that something elemental has been left behind by the world—or even that something elemental to life has left the world. As if, say, we were to wake up one night and find that the moon had fallen out of the sky and was no more. That, I think, might be exactly what it is like to spend Christmas in Los Angeles, where (reportedly) people sometimes spray their lawns with fake snow.

The writer Adam Gopnik seized on this line and this elegiac song by the great songwriter as the touchstone and coda to the last chapter of his five-part lecture on “Winter,” which he delivered for the Canadian Massey Lecture Series at McGill University in 2011. The lectures were collected into a book the same year, but I didn’t buy it until it was in paperback in 2016. So, this was a nine-year-old work in a volume that had been staring at me from my bookshelf, daring me to actually read the goddamn thing, for four years.

Tell me you don’t have such recriminating tomes on your bookshelves as well.

Gopnik is an exceptional intellect and a fine and beautiful and exacting writer. “Papon’s Paper Trail,” a journalistic account of the trial of a high French functionary brought to trial by survivors of the Holocaust and convicted in 1999 for war crimes during the Vichy period, is among my favorite essays; he managed to capture all the legal complexities of trying a man for what might be called “bureaucratic” crimes committed four decades previous, while conveying what was distinctly French about both the trial and Papon’s crimes, as well as the moral and legal necessity of his conviction. His writing about American gun culture, gun violence and gun control is as fine an example of journalism in the service of moral outrage as the best of Christopher Hitchens. The portrait he drew of his psychotherapist in “Man Goes to a Doctor” is funny and poignant and admiring while also being thoughtful about the popular cult of therapy. When he writes about writers and thinkers and artists of all kinds from many periods of history I always learn things.

His writing can also seem performative, when he leaves the earth of real things and real people in the real world and begins to fall down a rabbit hole of his own abstractions; all that hyper-intellectualism, all those cultural allusions, can begin to feel like so much spun cotton candy. (I once heard an interview with Gopnik by Katha Pollitt on the “On Being” podcast when Pollitt had to stop her guest, who was disappearing down that hole, to remind him that she was part of the conversation.)

“Winter” is outstanding and, in the end, moving and melancholy. And you most certainly learn a lot in this fine mash-up of art, history, science and philosophy. The subtitle to his lectures is “Five Windows on a Season,” and the window is important throughout; the author begins and ends his lectures with a memory of himself as a boy at a window, gazing out at the Montreal snow: modern winter (meaning winter as we experience it since the development of indoor heating) is a winter you can admire, fall in love with, and project your longings onto from a cozy place at your living room window. I had bought the book, I think because I understood this instinctively myself, though I would not have been able to articulate it: the idea of winter is lovely (if the actual experience of it, many winter days, is one of hoping for spring).

Gopnik explores five different ideas of winter: romantic winter—the winter in art and music and poetry and metaphor; radical winter—the quest to experience (if not quite conquer) severest winter, expressed in the history of 19^th and 20^th century attempts to reach the Poles; recuperative winter—the winter of the spirit, of Dickens and Christmas carols, and the celebration of Christmas; recreational winter—the winter of skating and (Gopnik’s passion) hockey; and remembering winter—what winter means to us now that it may be disappearing.

Of these, recreational winter is the most fun. The author truly loves hockey, understands the game deeply, and also deeply deplores the fighting and violence that has become part of the spectacle; personally, I have never known what to make of those fights. (Are they really mad at each other or is it a performance for the crowd?)

But it’s toward the end of that first chapter, on the romance of winter and the metaphors we have created to express its romantic meaning, that the author’s brilliance as a writer lifts all those solemn cultural allusions up to something human and immediate for the reader, rescues from all that learnedness an insight that for anyone over the age of, say, 50 will feel like looking in a mirror.     

A question for those in that cohort: Have you perhaps experienced, alongside all the downsides that come with passing the half-century mark, the sense that you are now more truly yourself than you have ever been and more at ease with this person you have become? That however much you might wish every now and again to relive your athletic or occupational or sexual glory days, you really wouldn’t go back to being the anxious, overwrought 20-something (or over-compensating 30-something) you once were? The sense that however much has gone wrong and has seemed, when it hasn’t been tragic, to have been a comedy in which you are the butt of the joke--still you realize now that it was just the way life was destined to go and you are less and less interested in carrying the grudge or having a do-over?

The mileage you have travelled has refined you and you are now more you than you have ever been.

It’s the process by which people attain what we call “wisdom,” and believe it or not there is now an emerging science of wisdom. But to return to Gopnik, this process of refinement over time appears to be mirrored in a compelling way in nature as well.  Recall the old thing about how “no two snowflakes are exactly alike”—it’s one of those romantic metaphors that have grown up around winter.

Well, it turns out that it’s true, but not quite true in the way we had always thought. Here is how Gopnik explains it:

“…[A]s recently as 1988, a cloud scientist named Nancy Knight took a plane up into the clouds above Madison, Wisconsin, and there found two simple but identical snow crystals—hexagonal prisms, each as like the other as one Olsen twin is like the other. Snowflakes, it seems, are not only alike, they usually start out more or less the same…..[However] it turns out that, while It’s true that snowflakes often start out alike, it is their descent from the clouds into the world that makes them alter.”

Gopnik quotes from an Australian science writer, Karl Kruszelnicki, who explains that “As a snowflake falls it tumbles through many different environments. So the snowflake that you see on the ground is deeply affected by the different temperatures, humidities, velocities, turbulences, etc., that it has experienced on the way. Their different shapes are all owed to their different paths downward….”

And so our author concludes: “…The sign at Starbucks should read ‘Friends Are Like Snowflakes: More Different and Beautiful Each Time You Cross Their Path in Our Common Descent.’ For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever stranger and more complex patterns, until at last they touch the earth. Then, like us, they melt.”