When Shakespeare began Richard III with "Now is the winter of our discontent," he cited the wrong season. Summer, at least to me, is the real season of discontent. To be sure, summer has its charms, not the least of which is the pedestrian miracle of the vegetable garden. Summer in New England also makes the ocean usable to swimmers, which some in this region consider a greater miracle than loaves and fishes. And there are those nights perfected for porch sitting: the sultry air buoyant as a harbor and the clink of ice cubes in glasses and the soft aspirates of chat and narrative rising and falling like the swell of boats at anchor. Summer does have its virtues, and the livin' is easier. But summer is really the cheap seats at Fenway, the oxymoron of soft ice cream, crumbs in the cold water bottle.
So what recommends the great and glorious winter, the real season of content? Many people don't understand winter. They see winter as a corset, a mighty engine of confinement and asphyxiation; winter is the temporal equivalent of being sent to bed without supper. But anyone who has walked the streets at 4 AM during the first snowfall or lined their lungs with that first sharp tangy-sour cleansing smell of split oak going into the stove knows an opposite truth. Winter brings us around, back, to the inevitable essentials: warmth, decent food, serviceable clothing, proportional thought, considered action. Winter helps us measure ourselves because it resists us; it doesn't allow any myths about superiority or talent to lie around unrehearsed the way summer lulls us into untested affirmatives about our character. Winter reflects back to us the two natures of our nature, crazed ice over the purling water of a brook, one element in two versions, just as we hold in ourselves the ice of our own dying and the free water of imagination.
The winter that for me captures "winter" is the kind of winter Thoreau must have spent during his first year at (and on) Walden Pond. His cabin measured 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 human life was the railroad a few rods from him; Concord lay a mile and a half away. As the shingles of his cabin grew more weathered during his first winter there, so must have he. By investigating his world, he investigated himself. The depths of the pond he recorded so dutifully signaled his own depths, its length and breadth the geography of his own place in the world.
Thoreau could not have done what he did if he lived where it was always 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, a world loosened from material desire, even from emotional desire, so that he could distill the spirits of a December night's silence. Our modern world is in part filled with too much summer, too much that simply is without question 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.
(October 1996)