The snow had stopped after dumping a fresh eight inches on the old crust. The winter bareness spread drearily over it now, suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.īut just before noon the light changed. The snow was falling over the ice and hiding the ice. The snow was falling over the ice and turning to ice. One cold winter morning, the patterns of cloud cover began to change slightly for the better. Colder and intangible but more disquieting. Cold and intangible were all things in earth and heaven. More forlorn they were than stale bones.Ī long time passed in such weather. It became only a matter of time until this valley was different, unreal and mocking, until the landscape and snow and ice were forever of the same shapeless pattern. Permanent ice began to form in the highest mountain valleys.
Two or three times before the awful storm was over, the white blur above the mountains caught the full fury of the rushing wind. Now the land itself seemed oppressed and banal in comparison to before. On the north wall of the valley a mile away, seven deer had frozen on a rock. Although the breeze had now utterly ceased, the temperature had dropped ten degrees and made it memorable. The very next morning when the snow finally ceased falling, quickly the passion went out of the sky. The cold increased until it was thirty below zero. Animals that occupied the land felt the wind of the blizzard increase, and overhead the sky grew dark with snow. In a matter of weeks, in a blizzard, how it snowed so hard.
One could not imagine that matters could get worse, but they did. On the days when the sun shone, it was only an instant. On the coldest days the snowdrifts were deep and the pine needles in the glades were ossified with ice. It snowed every day now, sometimes only brief flurries that powdered the snow crust, sometimes for real. The same day returned once again - the same waste of snow and rock very lonely and austere. Every morning the world flung itself over and the view had changed, appearing a shade lighter, but the country was of a deadly and a deceitful sameness. There had not been such a winter for years. Annotated text and full source material available here. This is an excerpt from Part I, “The Four Seasons,” at the end of a long, frigid winter. Each sentence, phrase or clause is borrowed it includes no original language. The Nature Book is a novel that collages nature descriptions from 300 other novels into a single, seamless text. To receive the Quarterly Journal, become a member or purchase at our bookstore.
This piece appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: Catharsis, No.25
0 kommentar(er)
