On Snow

“In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them.”   Yevgeny Yevtushenko quotes (Russian Poet, b.1933)

"Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.”  Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

On May 1st, 20__, I happened to walk out of my house directly into snow. Snow seemed, on May 1st, as improbable as a rain of frogs, but in Minnesota, in May, that might be a slight exaggeration. The improbability caught my attention, however, because it reminded me that whenever I go into my head and pull the name "X" from the catalogues of memory, as I had done just moments before I walked out the front door, the image of snow always comes with it. I am always amazed at how the brain works like that. I’ve been told, or read somewhere, that unrelated neurons can be triggered just by recalling the memory of another thing held in closely adjoining brain space. In this case I could almost feel the neighborly neurons firing and bringing up their dual images, the name and the image, X and snow. 

The reason for this is not obscure. X and I dated, briefly, in winter, almost thirty years before; we had our greatest walks in snow. My memory is clear, if a bit romantic, on this point. The image that usually arises and is offered to me, when I think of X, is one of nighttime, empty darkened farm-town streets and crisp prairie air filled with snow. The snow is falling steadily and very slowly but it also moves and turns and rolls like a deep and unstill river in a hurry to go nowhere. It is the kind of snow that is soft and forgiving, though, with seemingly weightless but very, very large flakes, the kind that shrouds the world beyond the nearest streetlights and deadens every sound except for that of our footfalls and the clipped, breathy words that pass between us in our private hollow inside the whirling mass. It is the kind of snow that closes tightly around us and makes the world simple, transforming it into one made only of two people and snow -- as if nothing else exists.  

There is neither heaven nor earth

only snow

falling incessantly

Hashin

I had thought of X at the threshold of my door and had also recalled this image of snow and it was almost as if I had conjured, Prospero-like, the real May snow outside my door, the rain of frogs, with my act of memory. But this snow, on May 1st, was hard and grey and unfriendly. And it wasn’t really snow, it was more like the pebbles of a hard cold dirty rain. It was nothing like the image in my brain and in the end it reminded me of nothing whatsoever about X. Whatever act of magic – which was not mine, I now realized – had brought down this hard cold rain, it seemed malign and I felt like I was being reminded only of the very deep gulf between then and now.