Bitter Winter

This winter will mark my nineteenth year. It's been an unusually cold winter, a frigid veil being drawn over me here at University Park by the bitter effects of the twice-appearing polar vortex. As cold as it may grow and as briefly as the radiance of day may shine in these bitter months, there is something that has always been alluring to me about winter. Some people may concur with me, may also be drawn to this recess in nature's conviviality, but for different reasons. Yes, it is natural to love winter for the beauty of the snow, of the wind-whipped drifts that festoon the yards and fields and sidewalks and forests. I won't be so crass as to say I don't love it. I have a soft spot in my heart for the beauties of winter. But that isn't what I feel now.

There's something about winter that brings tidings of a harsh yet bucolic, brutal yet beautiful solitude. There's something in the shrieking lashings of the wind and the frozen roughness of the soil that allows the soul to turn inward in a sort of nature-driven introspection. Just as the biting temperatures of winter force us indoors when they come, they too have the power to force our souls deeper inside ourselves, deeper into the recesses of our minds to a place where we may study ourselves against the backdrop of reality.

If there is ever a time to feel lonely, to feel lost, to feel broken, to feel bitter, it is winter. When the autumnal equinox passes us by and the Earth commences its forward-bending march to and through winter, all the greenery and foliage of the landscape retracts into the ground below us. Color retreats, life goes dormant, and for a time all is still and colorless. When I was in the ninth grade, I had to read the novel Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. That book has changed the way I observe winter, and I can find no better descriptions of the perennial retreat of nature.

"... a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface… in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access.”

"About a mile farther, on a road I had never travelled, we came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier."

There's something about winter that has the potential to make me withdraw within myself and to view the world in a way very similar to that of a hermit, living high on a snowy mountain overlooking a pastoral valley made barren by the occupying cold. I've always been the sort of person to be absorbed in thought. Take it as this: winter only facilitates further capacity for thought in me, and from a greater distance than before. Don't think of me as distant. Just think of me as a man who sits out on a stump on the hill as the evening clouds settle in, letting the snow gather in tufts about his shoulders, breathing his steam into the sharp air, and - above all - thinking.

I leave you with this song, a song I always thought would serve well as a companion piece to not only scenes of Ethan Frome, but of your own sort of introspection in the dead of winter.

The Swell Season - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova

My sincerest regards,
Brandon