Snow

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It snowed yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Snow, snow, snow. Some people say that there are as many as 52 names for snow in Inuktitut. That may be an exaggeration but there seems to at least be these ones: aput 'snow on the ground', qana 'falling snow', piqsirpoq 'drifting snow', and qimuqsuq 'a snow drift.'

We should have more names for snow. For example it would be good to have a name for disappearing snow. That’s what’s happening here today and, though I complained about being housebound, about the slippery streets, and about the cold, I’ll be sorry to see it go, because soon I’ll start worrying about whether the coming summer is going to bring us the heat waves and forest fires we saw last year.

In Orman Pamuk’s poignant political thriller Snow, “the silence of the snow” is a theme throughout the novel. The Snow Palace Hotel, where the protagonist Ka stays, is in the snowbound city of Kars. The snow symbolizes a world which is cut off from the outside world and also the apathy of its residents.

Snow is often used as a symbol in literature. I recently read Edith Wharton’s wonderful 1911 novel, Ethan Frome, set in a town in which winter represents isolation and unhappiness, yet there is also reference to “the crystal clearness” of the winter. In Shakespeare snow can refer to purity, chastity, or the decline of old age.

Snow can have positive or negative implications or sometimes both, as in the final words of James Joyce’s The Dead: ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their latter end, upon all the living and the dead.’ Some critics have claimed the snow here represents death and desolation, but surely it also suggests the opportunity for renewal and another chance. Sometimes the bleakest scenario offers the chance to turn things around.

That’s how I see it. Sometimes things seem hopeless, like yesterday’s New York Times article on global warming entitled “Time to Panic,” yet I am determined to believe that individual action can prompt political action and we can turn things around.

I’m going to keep in my mind the image of the beautiful labyrinth that artist and poet Sophia Rosenberg created on Lasqueti Island last week.

 

 

The labyrinth path shows a journey that offers a return and a new beginning. But we have to stay on the path. We have to keep putting one foot in front of the other. We have to think seriously about our footprints.

 

 

 

Clear-sightedness

A few years ago, my vision worsened. My eyesight was blurry and I found it hard to see when I drove  at night, and my ophthalmologist said I had to deal with my cataracts. I’d resisted this advice previously because, although I am quite brave about things that take place below the neck, I hate the idea of anything being done to my eyes. In nightmares, the thought of needles being put in my eyes is at the top of my torture list.

But it was time. What made it easier to face the surgery was the positive experience of many of my contemporaries. And, in particular, old friend told me that what was wonderful was not just the clarity of vision but the brilliance of colours. “It’s as though your eyes had been covered by brown sludge,” he said, “and then it’s removed and everything brightens.” That sounded good.

I kept those thoughts with me as I gritted my teeth and faced the scalpel and found, a few days after the surgery, that he was right. What had looked like a brownish-blue bowl would now have to be called cerulean. It was that bright! A scarf that I’d thought of as mauve was actually closer to magenta. A brown shirt had become tangerine. Surgery had coloured my world!

However, it hasn’t made me as clear sighted as I’d like to be. I still see the world through the eyes of someone who’s been looking at it for almost seventy-seven years. These are old eyes, and they see things through a film of custom and habit.

When I was young, I knew my parents didn’t live in my world. They didn’t like the music, magazines, movies or books I found so exciting. They didn’t appreciate the way the fifties and sixties had changed everything. They saw an erosion of the values they’d held, and the things that delighted me just depressed them.

Looking back now, I begin to understand how it was for them. I know that nostalgia is an unreliable emotion that produces a good deal of falsehood but it’s hard not to look back. It’s difficult for me to see things without a lens of disappointment and I fear for the future. I can cope with social media, but I don’t like it. I admire the savvy of the young, but I can’t imagine that anything good can come of internet dating. I’ve never thought I was a prude, but I now find much of today’s world vulgar.

It’s my old eyes. I wish I could see things freshly.  I need a procedure that will remove that sludgy film of experience that is limiting my vision. I guess a lot of us old folk do.

Fly Shame

Recently I read an article in the Guardian that listed new words for guilt about air travel: in the Netherlands it’s vliegschaamte; in Sweden it’s flygskam; in Germany, Flugscham. Literally, they all mean “fly shame.” I wonder if there are also words for “meat shame” or “dairy shame”?

These are the things I have been ranting about lately. Since the Cop 24 climate change talks, the Davos Economic Forum, the UN and Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change, I’ve been increasingly worried about the climate crisis. Greta Thunberg’s presentations at COP 24 and Davos, as well as her TED talk, have made me remorseful about the damage my generation has created, the degraded environment we are leaving for our grandchildren. And, since watching clips of the hundreds of thousands of young people demonstrating around the world to draw attention to these problems, I’ve felt compelled to change some of my own practices. I doubt that I’ll ever fly again, I no longer eat meat or eggs and I don’t drink milk. But I can’t quite give up cheese. The cheese stands alone, says the old nursery song called“The Farmer in the Dell.” For me, the cheese stands alone. For the moment. Maybe one day I’ll give it up.

But, first, what I have to renounce is the random ranting. Yesterday I was having a pleasant conversation with an old friend and then, when she spoke happily about two trips that she has planned, I took her to task about the evils of air travel. “It’s time for everyone to just stay home,” I bellowed, and attempted to make her feel guilty about these holidays.

Why? She’s a good person who, unlike me, uses public transport and walks almost everywhere. She goes away only for long trips to Europe to see friends and to visit relatives in her old country; she doesn’t zip off for five days at an all-inclusive in some warm place simply because winter is getting to her. She shops carefully and locally, recycles diligently, and volunteers at worthwhile local organizations. Who am I to complain about her occasional airplane flight?

And anyway, as my daughter wisely advised me, shame has never been an effective deterrent for any kind of behaviour.

So I’m now going to stick to writing letters to people in high places, leaving my friends to make their own decisions, and focusing on doing a bit better in my own life. And perhaps cutting back a bit on the cheese.

 

Libraries

  

Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the virtues of bookstores: Massey Books in Vancouver, Munro’s in Victoria, even our new little new and used bookstore in Nanaimo, Windowseat Books. These, and so many other independent bookstores, are inviting spaces which are full of treasures.

But today I am thinking about libraries, because yesterday my friend Patricia Young, an award-winning Victoria poet, and I had the pleasure of reading from our new books at the North Nanaimo branch of the Vancouver Island Regional Library, and it got me thinking about the special attractions of libraries.

As a child I was taken frequently to both the Dunbar and the Kerrisdale libraries in Vancouver. What freedom I felt in those places, with all those shelves and shelves of books. I remember that there was a children’s section and an adult section, but I don’t remember anyone ever stopping me when I moved from one to the other. I felt on the brink of great discoveries. As Virginia Woolf said, I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

It was a privilege to work part-time at the Blackader-Lauterman Library of Architecture and Art at McGill many years ago, and to live across the street from the very beautiful old Westmount Library with its inscription, Tongues in Trees, Books in the Running Brooks. Later there was the fabled New York Public  Library with its stone lions and the majestic Rose Main Reading Room. Most wonderful to me was the Bodleian’s Duke Humphrey’s Library at the University of Oxford, where inside the books were chained to the tables and the church bells from the surrounding colleges ring regularly. All these places fueled my imagination so that when, years later, I saw Wim Winders’ film, Wings of Desire, it was easy for me to accept that invisible angels might gather in libraries.

“What a great environment,” many people said about the meeting room of the North Nanaimo  library where Patricia and I read. The space is airy and light, with comfortable chairs, and Darby Love, the librarian, is friendly and facilitative. The library is frequented by people of all ages and all sorts, and is clearly a well-used community meeting space. Libraries, like churches, are welcoming to everyone and so, especially at downtown branches, they are used by the homeless and troubled, which is a good thing for all of us.

As Anne Herbert, author of Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty has written, Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

We’re lucky to have them!