When Shakespeare began Richard III with the line "Now is the winter of our discontent," he began with the wrong season. Summer, for any right-thinking yankee American, is the season of discontent, with its ague of humidity and its hysteric behavior where people take clothes off bodies that should not, by reason of good taste, be exposed. In the summer people frantically cram vacation down their throats, trying to fatten themselves like geese so that they may enjoy a good meal of themselves. But it never works since pate never gives pleasure to the goose and it's the hotel merchants and the bric-a-brac shopkeepers and restaurant owners who have the best dining since, like lucky hunters, their prey willingly serves their snares. Summer has all the disadvantages and none of the benefits of temptation, ratcheting the desires up tight with devilish enticement but never offering a spasm worth the twinge, or even the satisfaction of an indulgent remorse over one's sins. Summer is cheap seats, Dairy Queen soft ice-cream, crumbs in the bottle of the cold water bottle.
Well, all right, summer does have some virtues, like a boring man who at least dresses well. It makes the crops grow and provides us with the amply common miracle of turning mucky brown sillioned fields into lenses of green and gold that soften the harsh edge of living's light. It makes the ocean usable to swimmers, especially here in New Hampshire, which is no mean feat. It does slur a bit winter's tight-lipped sternness, forces up the ends of the mouth into a somewhat smile, so that people do not feel totally like slaves to routine or concubines of necessity. The livin' is easier, and we should always be thankful for respite no matter how it's packaged.
But as the winter lover will tell you, nothing is ever gotten without a little transaction being necessary, an ounce of flesh here, the dashing of a delusion there. One of the great illusions of summer is that one doesn't really need to work, one is free to enjoy life and go with the flow. The real moral of the fable about the ant and the grasshopper is not that work proves the virtuousness of the individual but that work makes life have meaning. A season that endorses the notion that work can now be avoided, that work is in fact something different than the true enjoyment of life, exacts a high price: atrophy of self-discipline, self-indulgence without self-understanding, the illusion of comfort. The only thing the Devil need have shown Jesus on the mountaintop is summer; it would have fit his sales pitch perfectly and saved him some time.
So what recommends the great and glorious winter, this season of content? First of all, many people don't understand winter. Where they see summer as the doffing of necessity's girdle, they see winter as just the opposite, as confinement and negation, the natural equivalent of puritan frigidity and being sent to bed without supper. But the opposite is really true. Winter is a time of expansion, reviving the creative powers narcotized by summer's sloth. It hones reality down to inescapable essentials: warmth, decent food, serviceable clothing, proportional thought, considered action, and thus releases us from the sirens of suntan oil, mobile listening devices, and the illusions of a freedom that asks no questions. Winter helps us measure ourselves because it resists us and does not protect our cherished myths about superiority or talent. It is a harsh-lighted mirror that constantly throws back to us what we are not and what we need to become. Where summer is sand that shifts, winter is crazed ice over purling water, a hard cast that holds our weight yet speaks in soft tones of one element in two versions, just as we in ourselves hold the ice of death and the free water of imagination.
I speak here of New England winter. Where winter is longer it becomes as dreary as a South Seas summer. And the winter I think of most often is the winter Thoreau must have spent at (and on) Walden Pond. A cabin ten by fifteen heated from a fireplace built with his own hands, his woodshed a few steps from his front door. The closest sign of life is the railroad a few rods from him; Concord's a mile and a half away. As the shingles of his cabin grew more weathered during his first summer there, they must have blended well with the surrounding forest during that first winter, the way an animal's fur changes to fit the changed scenery around it. He was as much one with his world as a human being can be. By investigating it, he investigated himself. The depths of the pond he recorded so dutifully were also his own depths; the obdurate ice that hid the sluggish fish below was his own mind filled with slow animal thoughts.
Thoreau could not have done what he did if it were summer. He needed a world of contrasts in order to find comparisons. He needed a restricted world in order to find what was free and unlimited. He needed a world freed of the static of material desire, even of emotional desire, so that it could hear and mine the silence of a chilled December night. Our modern world, freed as it has been by the emancipator technology, is in part filled with too much summer, too much that simply is without question or explanation or balancing contrast. A strong dose of Thoreauvian winter, both literal and figurative, would remind us of essentials, and the coldness that surrounds us might be balanced by the warmth of discovery and explanation.