Winter is the time to collect one’s spiritual skirts about oneself, stamp summer’s vigor off one’s boots (add it to that dirty pile by the door there, where others have tossed their cigarette butts, empty bottles, and impractical dreams of escaping to Florida) and huff up the stairs to one’s innermost rooms. Now is the time for roosting and ruminating. Collect, collect. Close the curtains against the flat grey sky.
Winter makes such inward turning instinctive, natural. One constantly hears of the “stillness” of snow; it is “like a blanket” which carpets the world in the depth of night, eerily yet sweetly silent. Its muffling qualities absorb both the sounds of the world at large and the pulsing nonstop sounds of our inner selves. It is hard, on encountering a freshly snow-capped world in winter’s early morning light, to think anything other than “Oh! How beautiful!” This moment is simply a moment, in bright-edged relief, with oneself. Yet even winter’s worst weather—dramatic ice storms, cold wet winds whipping around buildings, freezing rain—turn us toward ourselves. For although we bundle up in outward layers to protect our fragile bodies, the chill of such natural violence penetrates deeply. With these icy lashings we become aware (in a way nearly impossible in summer) of our own precarious mortality. What is this flesh? We wrap our coats more tightly about our bodies as we hurry along, our minds howling lonely with the wind.
Why is this season of solitude so abused? Stores decorate their windows with ghastly displays of lights and moving toys in an attempt to kill the early dark nights with flashing bulbs. People walk hand in hand down snow-softened streets, kissing under tree fungi and laughing into steaming mugs of hot cocoa or cider or whiskeys. They should be alone, and cold, and thinking of death! Have they not seen the trees? We should follow their example, and turn inward against the world. Winter is the season for building fortresses.
It is easy to make romance out of winter. Easier, especially, than looking seriously into oneself. Cold nights beg for one to turn in early, crawl into a cocoon of thought; sitting silently at a window in the dark as snow falls is appropriate winter behavior. Drink alone, if you must drink, and ponder the dregs of your cup. How sacrilegious that citizens run madly through the streets, filling up bars with their rosy-cheeked joviality so forced upon this season’s stillness. They frisk from lover to lover in order to “stay warm” in bed, in order to share the glow of a fire. All of these things attempt to disguise winter, to make it into a kind of darker, more intimate summer.
Everything romantic about winter is a farce. Ice skating! The very image of a perfect date—holding the hand of a lusty man in rough denim, falling together onto the ice. You’ll stare above into the pale winter sky, and he’ll look down at you with delicious eyes, and kiss the snow off your lashes. Ice skating! Nothing more than waiting in line for hours behind screaming children high on peppermint candies, paying money for skates which pull your ankles in impossible directions, paying more money to have a safe place to put your boots, and paying finally more money to enter the arena. Then, once on the ice, the realization that there is hardly room enough to breathe let alone skate, that the music is wretchedly loud and jarring, and more importantly that the ice is much harder and keener to make your acquaintance than you ever realized. By the time the adventure has worn itself out, you have nothing but ten minutes of gripping the sidewall and aching calves to show for it.
And parties, the endless holiday parties. Everyone gets together to eat sweet food, drink themselves into conviviality, and chatter the night away. Afterwards, once the party has disbanded and the last blinking Rudolph pin has trailed away out the door, the hostess cannot explain why the sight of so many half eaten cakes and empty glasses depresses her. She crawls into bed weeping. Winter is the season for eating spartanly. We must fill ourselves with Irish oatmeal, root vegetables, substance, substance. This constant sweet and empty noshing does little to nourish the true emptiness in us, which calls us to confront it directly. Instead, we hide behind a wall of fruitcake and small talk. Come spring, one is surprised to find that, on shedding one’s coat and scarves and sweaters, there is a stranger’s body beneath. Most unwelcome. If instead we had taken care to properly nourish— to honestly evaluate ourselves— we would, by the first tree’s budding, know our naked true selves intimately.
I can hardly write at all about winter sports, such as skiing. What disrespectful nonsense! To take a majestic mountain covered in snow and sleeping deeply, and to run about creating little crisscrossing paths down its slope like children romping over the stomach of their dozing father. Sit and look—paint the mountain, write of the mountain. Don not humiliate the mountain. Mountains know almost better than trees the necessity of winter’s depth. And the sight of winter runners, huffing out in steamy little breaths their exertions. One’s quiet, lonely walk through Prospect Park should not have to be interrupted by the thumping of joggers who must spit and hawk in the cold. Moving so constantly is yet another way to ignore winter’s demands on our psyche. Why not move to California, where winter is so mild? It almost does not exist. There is a reason Hollywood sits glittering there on the Pacific’s steep-cliff’d shores. There, one is never forced to sit still and think. One can drift. Please do: take your surfboard and drift all the way to Japan.
Winter is not, as they say, the season for giving. Winter is the season for selfishness! Enough has been said about the unapologetic materialism of the “holiday season,” but let me reiterate: shopping is a form of self-denial. It is a form of unthinkingly thrusting out into the world, blindly, arms outstretched. The glitter! The price tags! The abominable holiday music drowning out any desire for a structured thought! Don’t think they don’t know what they are doing—since pagan times, organizations have attempted to keep the masses “happy” during the long, dark months. They have every right to feel threatened by the idea of each human in society spending time getting to know himself and, consequently, knowing his true desires. Subvert! How much more appropriate, how much more meaningful, if one’s friends were to find inside their glittering, bow-topped boxes not underwear or hand towels but a letter! Writing letters is a sneaky way to give in winter, because although they may be addressed to friends and lovers, letters are truthfully written for the author himself. They are a form of self-discovery. Yet I do not know one person who is not delighted to receive a thoughtful letter. In this way, one can appear to give during the holiday seasons while actually pushing winter’s proper agenda. Upon receiving such a letter, one’s friend may very well take to the typewriter herself.
The changing of the seasons can be seen from my fire escape. Last summer I spent with a glass of red wine perched on the metal structure lightly like the wrens that played about the bushes near my window. I liked to listen to a woman across the way sing opera, sustaining one high, long note over and over to perfection. I breathed her in, and in autumn I bought a bird feeder. I planted seeds in it, preparing for winter, harvesting, harvesting. It is winter now, and ice freezes the rails and dusts the bush in fierce white and all is quiet.
I live my summers in youthful abandon. I fall in love often, with everyone. I burn. I skip from party to concert to bar to event. I wear swinging skirts and dainty shoes and cut my hair short. Summer is the season to grow lusty and brandish yourself about like a god. Tanning is only appropriate in summer (how I hate the sight of a crispy woman, burnt from the table, in the dead of winter! Give me white, pale flesh!) Spring is a childhood, but in summer we come into our sex. So it should be, as in autumn our souls age slowly in romance and friendship.
I once tried to return to a summer passion in the dead of winter. There was snow on the ground, but I flew South hoping to trick the seasons, flick the clock back a tick to an easier time. I took him in my arms, but it was like holding a child. He had twigs in his hair, and wore orange sweaters; the hair on his legs shone copper in late autumn’s sun. But I was from the North, and there was snow on the ground. I was pale and dry and my lips cracked under his kisses; I had started my metamorphosis and the cocoon was half complete. He tried to fit inside with me, but it was too late. I was nearly sealed in with myself.
My cocoon is made of glass, and all winter long I stare at my reflection from the inside, which stares right back. Even when I look further out, past the reflection, the greater world is still seen through my reflection. I coolly and quietly judge myself and the world from the inside out, internalizing, becoming heavy, becoming a vacuum, a doppelganger, gravity. In summer, I throw myself out like buckshot, scattered. In winter, I cull and I cull.
