Meditation on the Cold
But, more fundamentally, I am firm in my resolve to walk the mile and a half because it matters to me that I know both how the cold feels and what it means, neither of which can be known by my walking eight steps into an already warm car, driving a very short distance, and then walking a few dozen steps from my warm car to my (usually) heated building. To know what the cold feels like I must have the chance to be cold, and then the resolve to be cold, for how the cold feels is known by observation, and observation (as John Muir knew well) is impossible without a willing subjection of the self. I must feel the regions of the skin tighten, the mysterious surfaces harden. I must feel the burn of exposed flesh in the stinging wind. I must feel the hardening even of the soles of my boots, which in such weather as this lose their cushion. I must feel the many ways in which life itself becomes hard.
What it means, the cold, is known in part by observation and therefore by subjection and submission. But it is also known by reflection, even as art is known in part by the criticism that completes it. What the cold means is known by memory and by language. We reflect on what we ourselves remember about the cold and about its place in the various narratives of human suffering: the story of a young Elie Wiesel, for example, running through the snow as the eastern front unraveled, or the tale of Ivan Denisovich marching to work on that one good day in his life, or even John Muir’s account of chasing his beloved water ouzel out into the cold and barren snowscape. You cannot expect a warm man to feel the cold, Solzhenitsyn tells us. And he is right. Poor Tom, loose in Lear’s storm, miserable and cold, knows something that Goneril and Regan can never know, for, cold-hearted though they be, they will never willingly be cold.
And for what he knows, for what he is willing by suffering to know, Poor Tom—Edgar in disguise—wins something for himself and for those around him, notwithstanding “the weight of this sad time” he must now obey, or what is grimly implied by Kent’s journey “shortly to go.” When you recollect and reflect upon and articulate the cold, you see at last that the cold is good. In the cold you know you are alive. You see your breath—the breath that Lear looks for as he holds the glass to the lips of the dying Cordelia—and you know that you’re alive. You are alive because you suffer. Patior, ergo sum.
There is no life in Cancun, no life on the beach at Daytona. There no one feels alive—not the way one feels alive in the cold. For it is in the shivering and chattering and goose flesh of the cold that we are nearest the truth of the fragile and desperate human condition. Lovers of snow and cold are qualitatively different from the lovers of sun and surf; they are different moral beings altogether. Our great novelists have been Russian, not Texan; our great composer was an Austrian, not a Californian. No poet named Frost ever wrote a poem titled “Summer.”
It is fitting that we in the Humanities, so insistent that the business of a university is to make humans, should be swept off into the corners of the oldest buildings on our campuses. The knowledge and wisdom we seek and seek to impart do not require falsifying lenses or instruments of torture. We are as austere as monks in our work if we are doing it well. We ask for books and a room in which to talk about them. The computer is of no use to us, really, and the best of us know that the gee-whiz classrooms of the new millennium will produce more Gonerils and Regans than Poor Toms. We must dress warmly for a day in the office, and the students who come to see us there are as wooly as we.
But what ignoble savages we have become, spending our travel money to hear papers that do not feed the hungry or clothe the naked or provide company for the widows and orphans. How unkindly we speak of our colleagues, despite the years of “literature’s civilizing influence.” How quickly we move further and further away from the dark neighborhoods of downtown, despite our protests against sprawl and racial strife. How imperviously we commute in our Volvos all those miles to work to talk about oppression, and then all those miles home again to ignore it.
Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page
