{"id":143547,"date":"2021-03-01T10:00:49","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T15:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/?p=143547"},"modified":"2021-02-17T15:02:05","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T20:02:05","slug":"michelle-reviews-winter-five-windows-on-the-season-adam-gopnik","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/?p=143547","title":{"rendered":"Michelle Reviews: Winter: Five Windows on the Season &#8211; Adam Gopnik"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-143548 alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Winter.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"183\" height=\"275\" \/>The Massey Lectures is an annual series of lectures delivered by Canadian writers, scholars, and thinkers, that take form around a central idea or theme. In 2011, Adam Gopnik chose as his theme the winter season. His lecture (<a href=\"http:\/\/commonwealthcatalog.org\/details?agctrlid=bc4dda9f-df83-49f9-9df2-f564339aed4f&amp;shard=5d32da1a-31d5-4511-8d42-4c9fe2522ac3:::api.commonwealthcatalog.org:8983%2Fsolr%2FTempResults&amp;view=gallery\"><em>Winter: Five Windows on the Season<\/em><\/a>), structured in five-parts, focuses on ideas, events, and activities typically associated with the give-or-take span of time between December and March. His polymathic view on the season sweeps across art and literature, history and science, and in the final chapter, with an eye informed by present-day technology and theory, shifts towards the future.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The parts, in brief:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Romantic Winter revolves around an outlook apparently common to the Romantic period, when nature was seen as sublime, and the best view on the winter season was thought to be found inside, gazing out through a window;<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Radical Winter looks at the lure of the unknown and how a burgeoning fascination with the Arctic and Antarctica led to costly explorations that failed to reach either pole;\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Recuperative Winter traces Christmas\u2019 roots back to two Roman solstice festivals\u2014the Saturnalia and the Kalends\u2014and looks at the influencers\u2014notably Charles Dickens and cartoonist Thomas Nast\u2014whose work shaped the holiday\u2019s enduring image;\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Recreational Winter is decidedly one for skating and hockey enthusiasts; and, finally,<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Remembering Winter is concerned with climate change and cities designed to thrive in the coldest weather.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Romantic Winter was my favorite chapter and the one I found most engaging. Focused as it is on the work birthed by the Romantic movement, this section makes repeated mention of how, from a safe distance, artists and writers of the time made cathedrals out of snow formations, ships out of icebergs. How the then-notion of snowflakes being unique and individual (and a representation of the soul) has been shifted by science to the knowledge that snowflakes originate in a similar form and change as they fall. In this chapter, Gopnik turns us toward the moody work of German painter Caspar David Fredrich; urges us into the fur-filled sleighs that glide through the stories of Russian writer Alexander Pushkin; leads us into the realm of Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s Snow Queen; and ushers us off to Switzerland, to the Alps, where people who had perhaps viewed Turner\u2019s painted portrayal of the mountains, or read Ruskin\u2019s review of the area, went to witness winter\u2019s crowning glories while being kept safe from its threats in any one of the region\u2019s ski auberges.<\/p>\n<p>This chapter also introduced me to Anna Brownwell Jameson, who Gopnik credits with having \u201ca first-rate mind,\u201d and whose marriage in 1836 led to a move from England to Toronto. Once installed in Canada, an avid diarist, she records some of her experiences with the winter season, including a trip to Niagara Falls. Unfortunately, due to the timing of her visit, \u201cAll the associations which in imagination I had gathered round the scene, its appalling terrors, its soul-subduing beauty, power and height, and velocity and immensity, were all diminished in effect, or wholly lost.\u201d Her published diaries are now on my to be read list.<\/p>\n<p>Radical Winter also greatly appealed to me. I have long harbored my own fascination with the \u201cheroic age\u201d of arctic exploration, and have consumed a number of books on the subject, but this chapter, if memory serves, marked the first time I had encountered a mention of Sir Robert Scott\u2019s connection to Peter Pan\u2019s creator J.M. Barrie. One of Scott\u2019s last letters was apparently to Barrie, and in the aftermath of Scott\u2019s second ill-fated expedition Barrie was one of the writers engaged in the \u201cmyth-making\u201d that turned Scott and other explorers into the heroic legends they\u2019re still seen as today.<\/p>\n<p>But even if what I&#8217;ve noted as of-interest to me does nothing for you at all, there&#8217;s the chapter dedicated to winter sports, and a tour of Montreal&#8217;s underground city in the last chapter. While the book is a cohesive whole, there&#8217;s no reason its parts couldn&#8217;t be read out of order, or some of them skipped entirely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Massey Lectures is an annual series of lectures delivered by Canadian writers, scholars, and thinkers, that take form around a central idea or theme. In 2011, Adam Gopnik chose as his theme the winter season. His lecture (Winter: Five Windows on the Season), structured in five-parts, focuses on ideas, events, and activities typically associated&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":143548,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-michelle-reviews","category-non-fiction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Winter.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6V6sR-Blh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=143547"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":143564,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143547\/revisions\/143564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/143548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=143547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=143547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=143547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}