Joseph
Epstein celebrates the horrors of winter in Chicago for readers of The Daily Telegraph of London. Though he
opens with an observation by the great Indian writer R.K. Narayan, I detect in
Epstein’s essay a familiar note of Midwestern winter bluster coupled with a
witty undercutting of same. My home town, Cleveland, is frozen to the southern
shore of Lake Erie, slightly east of midway between two better-known legends of
weather lore, Chicago and Buffalo. We endured the “lake effect,” which I see
has earned its own Wikipedia entry. We were proud of the veneer of scientific
respectability the phrase lent to skin-shredding winds and three feet of snow. We
reveled in what Epstein calls “weather machismo.” My favorite memory of this
ilk dates from elementary school – walking half a mile on a winter morning,
hair still moist from a “wet comb,” and feeling the crinkle in my scalp as my
coif froze into stiff spikes. It was like wearing a helmet. Seated in class next
to the steam radiator, the ice melted and sent shivery rivulets down my back,
under my corduroy shirt. O felix culpa.
The reader who passed along a link to the essay is
a friend of Epstein’s, and he added: “Best prose of this type the Limeys have
seen since [Charles] Lamb.” That got me to wondering about Lamb’s response to
the burning cold of a London winter. Typically, he wrote about it in May – May 16,
1826, to be precise – in a letter to his friend Bernard Barton. He speaks like
a true Midwesterner:
“Coleridge writing to me a week or two since
begins his note -- `Summer has set in with its usual Severity.’ A cold Summer
is all I know of disagreeable in cold. I do not mind the utmost rigour of real
Winter, but these smiling hypocrites of Mays wither me to death.”
[When, we wonder, will Epstein devote an essay
to Charles Lamb, as he has to Lamb’s great friend and fellow-essayist William Hazlitt?]
2 comments:
Back in 1982 I traveled to Chicago for a business meeting. As my plane landed the pilot said the air temp was -26. The wind was howling, which brought the wind chill to -82.
As I walked to my meeting the next morning, I began feeling an odd sensation in my nose. I thought maybe it needed a good cleaning. After I performed a digital inspection and examined the results, I realized my breath was freezing to the hairs in my nose.
I was reminded of London's short story "Fifty Below." The narrator says you can tell when it's -50 because at that temperature spit will freeze before it hits the ground. Maybe so.
Oops - my memory failed me. The short story is "To Build A Fire."
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