Beautifully-written reflections on thinking in winter.
There is something profound about the weather in January in the north. I went back through sermons I wrote for the season after Epiphany, and every year, I had something to say about it. After thirty-five years in the north, the move south was a cultural shift, not least because in the south, one doesn’t have to get ready for winter. In South Carolina, one rarely needs to “get ready” to go outside in January, other than throwing on the closest jacket. I’ve always linked that to other cultural patterns, including patterns of thought. If Simic can’t name a cold-weather philosopher, how about one from temperate climes?
It only took me one year living in Germany, though, to suspect that one possible explanation for Kierkegaard was that he lived even further north, and in grayer skies in Denmark.
Simic concludes:
“No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on,” Voltaire was reputed to have said. That’s not what I believe. With deep winter upon us and the weather growing colder, even the wood smoke out of the neighbors’ chimneys could be described as philosophizing. I can see it move its lips as it rises, telling the indifferent sky about our loneliness, the torment of our minds and passions which we keep secret from each other, and the wonder and pain of our mortality and of our eventual vanishing from this earth. It’s a kind of deep, cathedral-like quiet that precedes a snowfall. One looks with amazement at the bare trees, the gray daylight making its slow retreat across the bare fields, and inevitably recalls that Emily Dickinson poem in which she speaks of just such a winter afternoon—windless and cold, when an otherworldly light falls and shadows hold their breath—and of the hurt that it gives us for which we can find no scar, only a closer peek inside ourselves where the meanings and all the unanswered questions are.
