In defense of winter

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.  ~ Dorothy Parker

To be fair: I like birds, and I like plants. And, to be fair: it is January, and spring has yet to rear its fool head. But every year I start to get nervous with the first sun rise after the winter solstice, because it means that spring is coming, and spring means summer. 

There is a character in the book I’m reading now (The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai) called Mrs. Eszter. Early in the book, she has an unnerving encounter and afterwards she walks through her village, in the dead of winter, growing stronger and more herself with every step, because she 

genuinely belonged to that class of people who ‘sicken with spring and collapse in summer’, for whom enervating warmth, incapacitating heat and the sun blazing in the sky were a source of terror . . . for it is only winter that can clear their vision, cool their ungovernable passions and reorganize that mass of loose thought dissolved in summer sweats.

YES, I shouted to myself as I read this, FINALLY THERE IS SOMEONE LIKE ME. The next hundred pages or so had me hoping that my resemblance to Mrs. Eszter (a rather sinister character) ended with this predilection for winter, but still — in this respect we are remarkably similar.

Winter, for those of us in the north, is our own little taste of Antarctica: blissful white emptiness. No one is going to harass you with shrieks of “It’s such a beautiful day!” and no one is going to criticize you for feeling quiet and indoorsy. Winter is a relief.

It is also an enhanced awareness of the breath, of the texture of protective things: woolly mammoth sweaters, spiced apple cider, soft voluminous blankets and fires to bake gingerbread. Winter encourages introversion (people, at least the ones around me, are infinitely saner in winter), and with it compassion — ‘the season of giving’ finds its natural home in the snowy months.


Last semester I was translating a small, lovely book all about winter, December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter. Each day in December gets its own short story, with a few (like the 6th, 10th, and 18th) getting more than one; each story takes place in a different year, though most revolve around WWII or German Unification in 1989. My favorite story is the 30th of December, 1940, in which the son of a rabbi and his friend, who have escaped from Germany to England, sit on the banks of the Cam in the middle of the night, discussing the death of Abel. In the course of this discussion, they introduce the idea of two incompatible wills: the Sommerwille (the will of summer) and the Winterwille (the will of winter). They agree, in a roundabout and Talmudic sort of way, that what it is possible — and perhaps inevitable — to want in summer evaporates in winter, and vice versa. They also agree that evil is nothing but a displaced or “untimely good.”

Their conversation is in many ways a strange tangle, and actually there are large chunks of it that I don’t understand, but I merely want to use this reasoning to defend winter from its gloomy reputation as the dark and deadly season. There is a good in winter, even if it seems a misplaced one (a misplaced turning of the year, or a misplaced celebration of light); more importantly, there is a type of thought — the kind that requires an intact, that is to say unmelted, brain — which is possible only in winter. 

It’s that lack of yapping. That’s what does it for me.