One must have a mind of winter / To regard the frost and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow, wrote Wallace Stevens, and not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind. His poem ‘The Snow Man’ is among the western world’s most treasured pieces of winter literature. It captures a certain fleetingness, an ambient froideur, a sudden eruption of personal melancholy – experiences right at the heart of what snow means to us.
Or should one say, meant to us? Here in Berlin, where old photographs show atmospheric blankets of white, our recent winters have seen less and less snowfall. The same goes for most great western cities: Paris, London, New York. Snow loss is primarily an environmental disaster, of course – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also a cultural one. For centuries, snow has had a major presence in European literature. It has been blank and multivalent, reassuring and formidable. It has symbolised death and it has signalled rebirth. (It has also been used for white-supremacist aesthetics.)
In the work of Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter and more recently his Swiss counterpart Urs Faes, snow thunders through Alpine landscapes with elemental beauty and fear. The often-snowy poems of Tomas Tranströmer are gorgeous, intimate, and strange – try the bilingual edition Bright Scythe. The Orhan Pamuk novel Snow subverts snow’s metaphorical potential in its critique of ideological simplicity, while Maria Stepanova’s recent poetry collection Holy Winter meditates on exile and metamorphosis amidst unforgettable Russian snowscapes.
Here in Berlin, where old photographs show atmospheric blankets of white, our recent winters have seen less and less snowfall.
Snow’s shifting cultural meaning is the subject of an upcoming book by the richly talented New York journalist-turned-author Amy Waldman, who is currently on fellowship at the American Academy of Berlin. When we met at a Charlottenburg café, Waldman told me that her project came from the realisation that snow was disappearing: “It started with seeing a painting of snow in a museum on a warm winter day, and then going outside and thinking, ‘oh, it used to snow!’ So I began thinking about the record of snow that you can find in works of art, and especially painting because it goes back so far. I was drawn to the idea of this loss, to the magnitude and strangeness of it, and to the question of how to make sense of it all.”
Snow, she says, is a metaphor “so woven into our make-up that it’s almost non-verbal”. Waldman’s driving question boils down to this: if snow has long shaped who we are and how we express ourselves, then what does it mean for it to go away?
One prong of her research is concerned with the interwar Berlin Schneepalast (“snow palace”) and its Viennese counterpart. “It was an early effort to defy the laws of nature,” Waldman explains, “by saying we love this and therefore we want to have it all the time. But that’s actually antithetical, because if we could press a button to have snow whenever we want, it would no longer be so special.” The Berlin Schneepalast, part of an exhibition, was meant to be short-lived, but its Vienna counterpart also lasted only six months, partly because its snow – produced using a Macgyvered recipe – was disgusting, with visitors slipping and burning their skin. “It also began snowing outside,” Waldman says, which must have diminished the appeal.
If snow is becoming increasingly ghostly, well, it’s becoming zombified as well – think the artificial snow used at Ski Dubai or on climate-changed mountains, or the even faker stuff used in White Christmas decorations worldwide. “I try not to be judgy,” Waldman says when I invite her to judge. “I guess I find it sad. On one level, it’s representative of the belief that we can just recreate what we’ve lost. But it’s also touching, because it does reflect this love we have for snow.” In Los Angeles, where Waldman grew up, there was a small outdoor shopping centre modelled on an old-timey village. Every December evening, she remembers, they would play Christmas music and it would ‘snow’. “I can mock that,” Waldman says, “but also, people love it. There’s this craving for the idea that beauty can just descend from the air.”
The battle over the Earth’s climate is not yet irretrievably lost. Still, Joni Mitchell – a child of snowy Canada – may well have been right about not knowing what one has until it’s gone. That Wallace Stevens poem ends with a solitary snowbound listener who, “nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” In presence, or in absence, a most worthwhile subject for literature.
