Gopnik - Winter: Five Windows on the Season

THE MASSEY LECTURES SERIES

The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former Governor General of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

This book comprises the 2011 Massey Lectures, Winter: Five Windows on the Season, broadcast in November 2011 as part of CBC Radios Ideas series. The producer of the series was Philip Coulter; the executive producer was Bernie Lucht.

ADAM GOPNIK

Born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal, where he attended McGill University, Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than twenty-five years. In the magazines pages, his subjects have included new art, old books, good food, French manners, liberal rhetoric, and family life. His collections of essays include Paris to the Moon , Angels and Ages , Through the Childrens Gate , and The Table Comes First . He has written two novels for children, The King in the Window and The Steps Across the Water , and, in collaboration with the composer David Shire, a musical comedy called Table . He lives in New York City with his wife, Martha Parker, and their two children, Luke and Olivia.

ALSO BY ADAM GOPNIK

NONFICTION

Paris to the Moon

Through the Childrens Gate: A Home in New York

Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life

The Table Comes First

High And Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (with Kirk Varnedoe)

CHILDRENS FICTION

The King in the Window

The Steps Across the Water

WINTER

Five Windows on the Season

ADAM GOPNIK

Copyright 2011 Adam Gopnik

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the authors rights.

This edition published in 2011 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.anansi.ca

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Gopnik, Adam
Winter : five windows on the season / Adam Gopnik.

(CBC Massey lecture series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN 978-1-77089-045-9

1. Winter. I. Title. II. Series: CBC Massey lecture series
QB637.8.G66 2011 508.2 C2011-903968-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011929922

Cover design: Bill Douglas
Cover photograph: Getty Images

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For Gudrun Bjerring Parker

Filmmaker, feminist, lover of the world,
woman of the north,
who raised and loved and nurtured and then
let go of my own true love,
and, knowing too well how Demeter felt, never let her heart
grow cold to the borrower.

Our envelope, as I have called it, the cultural insulation that separates us from nature, is rather like (to use a figure that has haunted me from childhood) the window of a lit-up railway carriage at night. Most of the time it is a mirror of our own concerns, including our concern about nature. As a mirror, it fills us with the sense that the world is something which exists primarily in reference to us: it was created for us; we are the centre of it and the whole point of its existence. But occasionally the mirror turns into a real window, through which we can see only the vision of an indifferent nature that goes along for untold aeons of time without us, seems to have produced us only by accident, and, if it were conscious, could only regret having done so.

Northrop Frye, Creation and Recreation

AUTHORS NOTE

Part of the pleasure of the Massey Lectures, Ive learned, is that they are published parallel with their delivery. This is a gift to the speaker, since it means that much of the work is done before the touring starts, and, for the hopelessly dilatory lecturer, the business of last-minute note-making becomes less frantic and wearing. But its also a challenge to those of us who have gained something over the years by being late with work, and whose practice has been to speak from notes, or even memory partly, I suppose, as a stunt, but at least as a stunt like skydiving, albeit skydiving without a parachute and in desperate search of a haystack, must be one somewhere down there . What is lost in lucidity is made up for by bravado.

Given that a lecture ought to be spoken, and that eventually I would speak these, I wanted for these essays a tone different from my well-varnished usual stuff, but that would still work for a reader as writing. I had, then, the idea of delivering a series of mock-Masseys the year before the real ones five improvised living room lectures in the winter of 2010, one on each subject, supported by the cheer of wine and caffeine. These chapters are based on transcripts of those living room lectures, which I have, with some expert help, ironed and pressed and manicured and trimmed, but not, I think, entirely robbed of at least some of their spoken sound. I have eliminated the more irksome tics all the in facts and actuallys and so, basicallys that occur more often than we know, and fear but I havent entirely cured, or tried to cure, the slightly ragged and excited edges of the performance. (Spoken sentences, Ive discovered, have a natural three-part rhythm: a statement, its expansion, and then its summary in simpler form.) These chapters are meant to sound vocal, and I hope that some of the sound of a man who has boned up on a subject in several cases, just boned up and is sharing the afternoons enthusiasm with an evenings friends is still in place. I mention all this lest the reader think, experiencing the breathless rattle and crash of some of these sentences, that I simply did not notice that they sounded the way they sounded, or else for some reason was trying to create from scratch the sound of speech on the page, and failing at that.

These are, then, the amended transcripts of lectures I once gave, designed to be the vocal templates of lectures I have yet to deliver. If there are paradoxes in this enterprise, it seems to suit the subject which is, really, why winter, a season long seen as a sign of natures withdrawal from grace, has become for us a time of human warmth.

So I have first and most to thank my listeners Patty and Paul, Ariel and Alec and David, Becky and Emily, Leland and Aimee, and of course Martha and Luke and Olivia and even Butterscotch, who sat and chewed and wondered why for bearing with me. There are more people thanked at the back of the book, but without those ears, it wouldnt even have a front.

A. G.

New York

June 2011

ONE

ROMANTIC WINTER

The Season in Sight