It is 21 March, 2018, and the sleet and frozen rain that fell yesterday across Virginia have changed into swirling snow, large flakes, cloaking the brown yards and grey woods of this neighborhood with a mantle of wedding-cake white. No cars are driving the streets, the grandchildren are sleeping late, and the only sounds come from the crows visiting one another in the pines behind the house.
My love for snow goes back to my elementary school days, when even flurries often meant the cancellation of classes and a day of freedom. We’d tromp around outside in boots and coats, making snowmen and sledding paths, and then go inside to hot chocolate and the “little men” wars my brother and I invented using our hundreds of toy soldiers. Snow meant reading comic books by the fireplace, drinking Russian tea, and listening to my mother’s collection of show tunes on a large stereo.
My love for snow goes back to my elementary school days, when even flurries often meant the cancellation of classes and a day of freedom. We’d tromp around outside in boots and coats, making snowmen and sledding paths, and then go inside to hot chocolate and the “little men” wars my brother and I invented using our hundreds of toy soldiers. Snow meant reading comic books by the fireplace, drinking Russian tea, and listening to my mother’s collection of show tunes on a large stereo.
Today snow brings me different pleasures: silence, coffee instead of hot chocolate, novels and books of history rather than Classics Illustrated or Sargent Rock, music from a laptop rather than a record player.
In addition, snow heightens my sense of the beautiful.
I am sure I found snow beautiful as a child, but to a man in the last quarter of his life rather than the first, the beauty of snow—indeed, all beauty—takes on an urgency and intensity of meaning the boy could not possibly have known. In A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman captured that emotion in this poem:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Twenty more years, if I am blessed to live so long, leaves me far fewer springs. By mentioning my mortality, I don’t intend dreariness or morbidity here, but rather, celebration. As we age, our eyes fail, our sense of taste diminishes, but at the same time, at least in my case, certain interior senses sharpen, honed by years of living through the trials and triumphs witnessed and borne by all human creatures my age. Whereas the boy saw snow as a playground and an escape from school, the man who remembers the boy now looks at a snowfall with gratitude and appreciation, as if witnessing a miracle.
Beauty—the snow, a seaside sunrise, a poem, a painting, the Irish-green eyes of the clerk at the Seven Eleven—can also act as a balm for the troubled, for those of us suffering grief or guilt, sadness or remorse. To stand in the presence of great beauty can bear us away, however temporarily, from the pain of those voices inside our heads. When we are walking through hell, beauty can be one of the candles that brighten our darkness. When despair darkens our day, when we brood on our lives and how we may have abused our gifts, our family, or our friends, beauty can speak to us of the good in the world, reminding us of our better nature, our better selves. Beauty echoes the words spoken by a king on his throne in the Old Book: "Behold, I make all things new."
Dostoevsky once wrote: “Beauty will save the world." In his Nobel Prize speech, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn affirmed his own belief in Dostoevsky's somewhat enigmatic statement.
I hope this is true. I hope that beauty can save the world. I don’t know.
But I do know that beauty can help save me.
In addition, snow heightens my sense of the beautiful.
I am sure I found snow beautiful as a child, but to a man in the last quarter of his life rather than the first, the beauty of snow—indeed, all beauty—takes on an urgency and intensity of meaning the boy could not possibly have known. In A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman captured that emotion in this poem:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Twenty more years, if I am blessed to live so long, leaves me far fewer springs. By mentioning my mortality, I don’t intend dreariness or morbidity here, but rather, celebration. As we age, our eyes fail, our sense of taste diminishes, but at the same time, at least in my case, certain interior senses sharpen, honed by years of living through the trials and triumphs witnessed and borne by all human creatures my age. Whereas the boy saw snow as a playground and an escape from school, the man who remembers the boy now looks at a snowfall with gratitude and appreciation, as if witnessing a miracle.
Beauty—the snow, a seaside sunrise, a poem, a painting, the Irish-green eyes of the clerk at the Seven Eleven—can also act as a balm for the troubled, for those of us suffering grief or guilt, sadness or remorse. To stand in the presence of great beauty can bear us away, however temporarily, from the pain of those voices inside our heads. When we are walking through hell, beauty can be one of the candles that brighten our darkness. When despair darkens our day, when we brood on our lives and how we may have abused our gifts, our family, or our friends, beauty can speak to us of the good in the world, reminding us of our better nature, our better selves. Beauty echoes the words spoken by a king on his throne in the Old Book: "Behold, I make all things new."
Dostoevsky once wrote: “Beauty will save the world." In his Nobel Prize speech, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn affirmed his own belief in Dostoevsky's somewhat enigmatic statement.
I hope this is true. I hope that beauty can save the world. I don’t know.
But I do know that beauty can help save me.
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