The Polar Vortex is about to blow in up here on the lake, and I’m thinking of Thoreau, with his frozen ink and breaking up the water in his pail with a hammer. “Pity those who have not thick mittens,” he wrote in his journal. I’m up here in the attic with my fingerless gloves and the space heater, scratching away like Bob Cratchit…
My newest winter diary had gone a dozen days without a guardian spirit and then BOOM I saw this photo of Edward Gorey in one of his famous fur coats. (Speech balloons from my son’s Peanuts calendar.)
“I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.”
—Thoreau, journal, Dec. 5, 1856
Photo taken on Lake Erie yesterday.
On Spotify I came across a live version of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Winter in America” (from Tour De Force) that starts with an opening monologue that isn’t included on the record cut:
There’s only one season lately. There used to be an agreement between the seasons, that they would all stay for three months, and then go wherever seasons go when they’re not where we are. Lately there has been no spring, no summer, and no fall. Politically, and philosophically, and psychologically. There has only been the season of ice. It is the season of frozen dreams and frozen nightmares. A scene of frozen progress and frozen ideas. Frozen aspirations and inspirations. They call the season “winter.” We call the song “Winter in America.”
The song is followed by another monologue that’s a little lighter and funnier:
People say to me, “Gil, we cannot find your records.” I say, “Go to your record store. Go down to the left. Take a turn, go to the right. Look on the bottom shelf. You will find a box called ‘Miscellaneous.’ We are miscellaneous. We did not mean to be miscellaneous. Somehow it happened.”
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