WRITING IN WINTER

Spring and Summer will make poets of us all.  But Winter is coming, as it tends to do, and Winter forces people to be practical.

This is true in the literal sense; it is true as an analogy; I can’t think of a single sense of the world in which it is not applicable.  It is a perfect and beaten-to-death metaphor for love, and for most great ideas, and for idealism in general.  Spring and Summer are the times when everything seems possible, but that always passes, and I won’t dwell on further figurative implications at the moment because Summer is decisively over and, as I mentioned, once it is gone it is time to stop being poetic.

Spring makes me want to read Emily Dickinson, whose writings sound beautiful and ethereal but are as clear as mud when you try to get something concrete and useful out of them.  This is true of most poetry – that it sounds nice but isn’t good for squat, and I feel entitled to make this claim because I have a degree in English, although to tell the truth I wasn’t a very good student and, practically speaking, I haven’t the expertise to be saying such things.  And, to be quite thoroughly circular, what I learned from studying English is how intensely under-qualified I am to make any judgments like this at all.

Winter comes slowly, but no one ever suffers from uncertainty about whether it is going to arrive eventually (except, I’m told, for people in Texas and the nethermost regions of Arizona).  Winter serves the very practical function of forcing everyone’s heads out of the clouds.  Time to stop reading Dickinson.  Time to delve into psychology or philosophy or molecular biology or something equally weighty.  Time to wear coats and wool socks.

I am a writer.  In July I would have told you something wispy and ethereal and nonsensical about what that means to me, but the bluntest part of it is that I organize the world, automatically and by necessity, into words.  In July what I wanted to do was compose flowery lines that described the texture of sunlight coming through the imperfections in the glass of the windows of a hundred-year-old house.  It is now November.  The wordy part of my brain wants something solid and fundamental to be communicated when my pen goes to my paper.

When I was younger I said very flippantly (and unfortunately it was in an email that was going to a large number of people, all older than me) that November was my least favorite month of the year.  I was twelve, and what did I know?  I have absorbed a lot of the thoughts of people much older and wiser than me in the time since then, and I have become better at drawing conclusions slowly and with care.  I now appreciate November.  It communicates very concretely to me and to all the other dreamers in the world that there is a season for everything, and that this one is for wool socks and thinking earnest, practical thoughts.

Now I’ll return to metaphor, because I guess I’ve still got some Summer in my system.  Ten years ago – even seven years ago, or five or three – I was in my own Spring.  I wanted to write things that sounded beautiful – usefulness be hanged.  I wanted to be a writer because I liked words.  But Winter is coming, and it is long.  I can be a useless writer of frivolities, or I can write things that matter, more on the order of psychology or philosophy or molecular biology.  I can make people think, which is the most that any writer can do. 

And heaven help me, I’m going to try my level best.