Winter: Five Windows on the Season

by Adam Gopnik

The 2011 CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik, whose subject is winter -- the season, the space, the cycle.

Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. Here we learn how a poem by William Cowper heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Gopnik’s kaleidoscopic work ends in the present day, when he traverses the underground city in Montreal, pondering the future of Northern culture.

 A stunningly beautiful meditation buoyed by Gopnik’s trademark gentle wit, Winter is at once an enchanting homage to an idea of a season and a captivating journey through the modern imagination. This deluxe 50th anniversary edition includes full-colour images printed on two 8-page inserts.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Nature, History, Canada, Environment, Philosophy

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2011

About the author

Adam Gopnik is an American writer and essayist, renowned for his extensive contributions to The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1986. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal, he earned a BA in art history from McGill University and pursued graduate work at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. Gopnik began his career as the magazine’s art critic before becoming its Paris correspondent in 1995. His dispatches from France were later collected in Paris to the Moon (2000), a bestseller that marked his emergence as a major voice in literary nonfiction.
He is the author of numerous books exploring topics from parenting and urban life to liberalism and food culture, including Through the Children's Gate, The Table Comes First, Angels and Ages, A Thousand Small Sanities, and The Real Work. Gopnik’s children’s fiction includes The King in the Window and The Steps Across the Water. He also delivered the 50th Massey Lectures in 2011, which became the basis for Winter: Five Windows on the Season.
Since 2015, Gopnik has expanded into musical theatre, writing lyrics and libretti for works such as The Most Beautiful Room in New York and the oratorio Sentences. He is a frequent media commentator, with appearances on BBC Radio 4 and Charlie Rose, and has received several National Magazine Awards and a George Polk Award. Gopnik lives in New York with his wife and their two children. He remains an influential cultural commentator known for his wit, insight, and elegant prose.

Reviews

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ah man. This is so, so, so written by a Montreal anglo. What's a Montreal anglo, you ask? As pertains to this particular set of lectures-cum-essays, a Montreal anglo exhibits the following qualities:

- a sense of deep, profound superiority about living in a winter city.
- a sense of deep, profound superiority about living in Montreal, proper
- a sense of deep, profound superiority about keeping a shovel in the trunk of their car even in summer tbh
- the xenophobia of franco-Quebec coupled with the need to protect their own rights in anglo-Quebec becoming...a bit of a clusterfuck of not recognizing others' experiences (cf the lack, albeit not omission, of Indigenous experience in these lectures)
- a grumpy bitterness about how hard done by they all are
- HOCKEY
- a beautifully emotional joie-de-vivre that other Protestant cultures just don't have in the same way, sorry, change my mind
- a love of art, culture, and a somehow inescapable undercurrent of awareness of how they interact with their environment
- a constant need to talk about their city and how much they love it and why it's the best city ever and no other city compares (i mean honestly we all know it's true)
- a desire to philosophize and talk through all of these things and feelings over many beverages and maybe cigarettes

As a Montreal anglo myself, a lot of this resonated; some of it frustrated. And while I recognize a lot of flaws (the Eurocentrism; the self-indulgence; the pretentia), and it wasn't particularly insightful, it was a deeply pleasant read. We don't really need more histories of Western culture tbh, but as someone who does enjoy historical Western culture....it was cool, and reminded me of my B.A. in a really lovely way, to read about it through the lens of winter. Like, the book is fine -- it's just for a very particular CBC-radio-in-2010 audience. If you feel like tugging on those boots, go for it.

Of course, no one other than Montrealers really understand what it means to tug on boots in winter, ssssooooooooo......

[Steven Buechler · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the crush of September/October came - with back-to-school, travels, disruptions because of labour disputes, Thanksgiving, etc - it was a pleasure to sit back once in a while and reflect on the oncoming season of snow and ice.

-Page 178
"Ice wine, as every drinker knows, is sweetness made from stress. That's not news, or not exactly. All good wine takes its essential sugar from the stress of its circumstances: pinot noir, the grape of the cold country of Champagne, gets flabby and soupy as the climate warms. But ice wine is extreme sweetness made from extraordinary stress. Every winter the grapes on the Niagara Peninsula are left not merely to chill but to actually freeze - the worst thing that normally can happen to fruit - and the the brutal cold forces all the natural sugar into the core of the grape, where it waits to be pressed out.
And in that simple paradox - the hardes weather makes the nicest wine - lies a secret that gives shpae to the winter season, and to our feelings about it. Without the stress of cold in a temperate climate, without the cylce of the seasons experienced not as a gentle swell up and down but as as an extreme lurch, bang! from one quadrant of the year to the next, a compensatory pleasure would vanish from the world. There is a lovely term in botany - vernalization - referring to seeds that can only thrive in spring if they have been through the severity of winter. Well, many aspects of our life have become, in the past several hundred years, "vernalized." (Even those who live in warmth recognize the need for at least the symbols of the cold, as in all that sprayed-on-snow in Los Angeles in December.) If we didn't remember winter in spring, it wouldn't be as lovely; if we didn't think of spring in winter, or search winter to find some new emotion of its own to make up for the absent ones, half of the keyboard of life would be missing. We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no black keys."

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of Adam Gopnik, especially Paris to the Moon, and have just picked up his Angels and Ages, which I am reading enthusiastically. This book, however, showed none of Gopnik's characteristic insight and wit. The subject, I think, is a bit too formless for Gopnik's approach. Typically, he moves inductively from well-researched and well-observed facts or well-considered specific literary works to surprising general theroies about them or about the world in general. Here, he has asked himself to take a relatively abstract idea and make concrete observations about it, and I don't believe the reversal in his conceptual approach from induction to deduction benefits him. His observations about winter seem self-indulgent and prosaic, words that I never thought I would use about his writing. Still contains some interesting tidbits about winter, but I'd start with one of his other works.

[Michael Clemens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gopnik's five chapters on the mentality and metaphor of Winter is an excellent, albeit meandering examination of the evolution of the season's meaning in Western thought. The book was written in conjunction with the CBC's Massey Lectures, and so the prose is more colloquial than we are accustomed to with Gopnik. Nevertheless, the staff writer for the New Yorker does a wonderful job of synthesizing centuries of Winter-thought into an accessible, sometimes funny, and always smart reflection of the months December to March.

[WarpDrive · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be perfectly honest, this is not really what I was hoping for. On the positive side it is a decently written book, with a good writing style and an impressive bibliography, and it is clear that the author made a real effort to examine the idea of winter from different perspectives. On the less positive side, it does not manage to really capture the magic and essence of winter, and it is sometimes too annoyingly and provincially US/Canadian-centric: just as an example, who cares about ice hockey or about the underground city of Montreal???
If you are after intellectual depth, then you will probably be better off spending your time reading something else.
Yes there are some undoubtedly original and quite interesting ideas and insights, and some nice poetry, but there are also a few common-place observations and statements that do not add much value.
Overall, maybe a pleasant enough experience, but nothing to be too excited about. The best chapter of the book is probably the first one (Romantic Winter) which I would rate with a 3.5 stars; on the other hand the section on recreational winter, so focused on ice hockey, does not deserve more than half a star at best - the author could have so much better used this space in his book to explore in more depth the philosophical, historical and psychological facets of our idea of winter.

[Connie G · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written in conjunction with five 2011 Massey Lectures broadcast in Canada by the CBC. I was happy to receive it as a "First Read." The author, Adam Gopnik, is a staff writer at "The New Yorker" and an essayist.

In this book, the author looks at winter from five themes--romantic, radical, recuperative, recreational, and remembering winter. The beginning of the book was densely filled with ideas of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Other winter observations were lighter such as the discussions about snowflakes, icebergs, artic explorers, and winter sports, especially his beloved ice hockey. He also looks at the origins of Christmas including the winter solstice celebrations. There were interesting sections about architecture and city planning where he wrote about the advent of central heating, the invention of the car, and the subterranean city of Montreal. With global warming advancing, winter may be changing in the future as more ice melts in the polar regions.

The book was well researched with an impressive bibliography. It also contained fourteen pages of artwork depicting various aspects of winter. I would recommend this book to any reader who enjoys the type of essays that you would find in "The New Yorker."

[Katie]

"Above all, I suppose, I love snow, in all its forms, and though I'm sure I would lose this taste if I had to endure enough of it, so far I've endured a lot and lost not a bit. Winter is, once again, the white page on which we write our hearts."


God, I love winter.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Though our setting for all these essays has been winter, our true subject has been time. We share a sense of timeless winter, of eternal winter as the place where time stands still, the poles as places permanently outside of our dailiness, the snow as nature’s secret…we could lose the polar icecaps but would not stop hearing winter music.”

“Winter is the white page on which we write our hearts.”

I was attracted to the book since winters have been harder the last few years, some huge losses around the holidays that changed them, and me, and really feeling the separation from nature. In spring, summer, fall, I can always find a tree to lean against and read or meditate, or watch the show, and the coldness of winter can make that impossible. The book overall is fine, it is similar to David Hinton’s The Wilds of Poetry and how English speaking Western humans found the language to speak of winter. The chapters on Christmas and hockey were less interesting, but overall well written, informative, and some passages were verging on poetic.

“Perhaps the first unmistakable clear statement of an entirely new and modern attitude towards winter-neither the sporadic excitement of the little ice age nor the depression of the neoclassical attitude- is a poem written towards the end of the eighteenth century by the forgotten British poet William Cowper:

O winter, ruler of the inverted year…
Thy forehead wrapp’d in clouds,
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne
A sliding care, indebted to no wheels
But urged by storms along its slippery way,
I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem’st,
And dreaded as thou art!...
I crown thee king of intimate delights,
Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness,
Of long interrupted evening, know.

It is a change that we tend to coalesce around a philosophical ideal that historians like to call “the picturesque”- turning to nature not as a thing to be feared or even as a thing to seek religious comfort from, but as a thing simply to enjoy, to take pleasure in…. This poem is the first unambiguous declaration of the winter picturesque. With Cowper we’re not simply experiencing an emotion that has never been registered before; in a sense we ae experiencing an emotion that has never been felt before.”

In 1799, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge goes to Germany on a winter walking trip and writes home to his wife about the opposite sense: of winter as a mysterious magnetic season that the wanderer is expelled into for his own good, for the purification and improvement of his soul. “What sublime scenery I have beheld!” Coleridge’s’ words are one of those rare passages of prose that truly mark the arrival of an epoch. It would be impossible to find anything like it in European literature only twenty-five years before… This kind of love of the winter scene is not of the force outside pressing in on the window, bringing family together. Instead it is for the ice-spirit pulling us out. This winter window is wrenched open by the level of the sublime.

The new idea (of winter’s beauty) is associated with Edmund Burke’s great essay on the sublime and beautiful from the middle of the eighteenth century. Burke’s was one of the three or four most powerful ideas in the history of thought, because he wrenched aesthetics away from the insipid idea of beauty (physical, manicured) towards recognition of the full span of human sympathy. Oceans and thunderstorms, precipices and abysses, towering volcanoes and, above all, snow-capped mountains- they rival and outdo the heritage of classical beauty exactly because they frighten us; they fill us with fear, with awe, with a sense of the inestimable mystery of the world.

A snow-capped mountain in Switzerland, seen from the comfort of an cabin, can set off a profound chain of thought about ice and ancient history; a gentle snow in the Paris suburbs can create images that show the transience of beauty. The winter window has two sides, one for the watcher and one for the white drifts, and the experience of winter is often not one or the other but both at once.

In Schubert’s song “Fruhlingstraum,” you hear the singer, the voice of the wandered in the white wilderness, looking at the frost patterns, the ice blooms, on the window and wondering who placed them there, who is their author? Is it God? Is it man? Are they merely accident? It’s unanswered and unanswerable, and presents the mind again the essential question that winter raises for the Romantic mind, the Romantic imagination: who made winter, and why was it made? Do we project form and meaning onto something that is just an absence, a non-happening of the natural order of warmth and sunshine, or does winter offer some mysterious residual sign of divinity?...

Winter was the significant season, the X-ray time, when the green veil of warmth and verdure was stripped away and we saw the world bare, as it really was.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Switzerland was the ultimate Romantic destination, the place you travelled to witness scary winter (snow-topped Alps) and sweet winter (comfortable ski auberges). Switzerland offered both mountain gloom and mountain glory, its mix of lowlands and heights- a powerful emotional metaphor for man and nature- and of Protestant and Catholic faiths. Protestant liberty established on the highlands, Catholic commonality by the lakes.

In the Japanese vision of winter, in Japanese poetry, and Japanese prints have an imagery of the “floating world,” where there is no notion that winter has in any way fallen from the hand of God, or is in any way evidence of cosmic organization. The Japanese idea of winter simply speaks of winter as simultaneously empty and full; the emptying out of nature by cold, and it’s also the filling up of the world by wind and snow… the Japanese idea of winter marked the final transformation of winter, and the idea of winter in Europe in the nineteenth century…Monet gets from the Japanese wood block prints a new infatuation with pure white-not a white that’s laid down unvaryingly with a single brushstroke, but instead a white that is made up kaleidoscopically with tiny touches of prismatic color. This is sweet winter at its sweetest, a winter so sweet that it loses the tang of the picturesque and becomes entirely exquisite- not pretty but deeply, renewingly lovely…winter becomes another kind of spring, a spring for aesthetes who find April’s green too common, but providing the same emotional lift of hope, the same pleasure of serene, unfolding slowness; the slow weight of frost, the chromatic varnishing of snow on the boughs of the chestnut tree, the still dawn scene, the semi-frozen river.

The Canadian painter Harris has a style where the real world is shown to pulsate and vibrate and glow with the presence of the higher spiritual force that lies beneath mere appearance. “Harris is rising into serene, uplifted planes, about the swirl into the holy places,” an admirer wrote.

Art is a way of expanding our resonances, civilization our way of resonating to those expansions.

The (musical) Romantics transformed winter from a single, sharp sound heard out of doors to the bright, muffled chromatic keyboard of extended feeling, full of sharps and flat runs, diminished chords and pedal effects. It is certainly, as poets have said, a good thing to see the world in a grain of sand. But it’s an even better one, and more to the purposes of art, to see a single grain of sand in the whole world. Or a single snowflake. The Romantics saw their snowflakes, embraced their glaciers, and remaking our minds, remade our world. A fearful desert had become a new province of the imagination.

The sign at Starbucks should read “Friends are like snowflakes: more different and beautiful each time you cross their path in our common descent.” For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into every stranger and more complex patterns, until at las they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.

We can flee civilization on snowshoes but she will always entrap us in the end. Search the Romantic winter you see for meaning and you will find your soul in a snowflake. Jump out the window to look for the winter you search for and the last thing you will find at the ends of the earth is another kind of window, showing your own reflection.

The composite quality of Christmas has been part of the holiday…almost certainly long before there was a Christ owed a mas. There has been a mid December holiday to celebrate the winter solstice by appeasing the sun god and assuring the return of spring since people first noticed the sun’s retreat…and the festival is almost always a festival of supplementary light. The light’s going out in the heavens, so we light one here. The Roman Kalends festival of light, greenery, and gift giving. All were recycles by the early Judeo-Christian followers: the act of lighting candles, the practice of giving gifts, even the use of holly and ivy.

There is a lovely term in botany-vernalization- referring to seeds that can only thrive in spring if they have been through the severity of winter. Without the stress of cold in a temperate climate, without the cycle of seasons, grapes would not be able to make ice wine. If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely…We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no white keys.

Somehow winter -the dead season, the off-season, the bleak season, the null season- is actually and secretly the season in which we store our own sense of the past.

We use winter as a blank slate, the place where everything is scrubbed away. From the most mystical vision to the most obvious folk use, winter is the climate of imagination. Winter displaces us from the normal cycles of nature so comes our escape into the mind…

Another sense of memory and winter is the memory of winter when it is over. The snows of winter become the tangible sands of the memory clock. Summer supplies the illusion of same time over and over. Winter and cold places supply a sense of past time, and an urge to think about time passing.

[Justine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gopnik uses the five lectures in the book to look at winter from five different angles, or through five different "windows," as the book's subtitle puts it. He starts with "Romantic Winter/The Season in Sight," which is about the winter as both "sweet" and "scary," "picturesque" and "sublime." Then he talks about polar exploration in "Radical Winter/The Season in Space." In "Recuperative Winter/The Season in Spirit" he talks about Christmas as a secular holiday and the things that have shaped it, from Dickens on, and then "Recreational Winter/The Season at Speed" is about winter sports, mostly ice skating and ice hockey. The last section of the book, "Remembering Winter/The Season in Silence," was for me the weakest: I wasn't totally convinced by the argument "that winter seems to act as a kind of magical place of memory, a storehouse of things recalled" (180).

But just summarizing the topics of the book doesn't begin to get at how pleasing it is to read. Gopnik's writing is smart and allusive and concerned with culture and cities and humanism, and Gopnik nicely ties together his own memories and experiences with larger themes and questions. The big question of the book is, as Gopnik puts it, "why winter, a season long seen as a sign of nature's withdrawal from grace, has become for us a time of human warmth" (xii). The answer is complicated, but it's not all philosophical: cheap coal and central heating are a big part of it, as Gopnik recognizes and emphasizes. As a culture, we can only start appreciating winter when we don't have to suffer through it, when winter isn't necessarily about cold and hardship and hunger. "Winter's persona changes with our perception of safety from it — the glass of the window […] is the lens through which modern winter is always seen. The romance of of winter is possible only when we have a warm, secure indoors to retreat to, and winter becomes a season to look at as much as one to live through" (4). So Gopnik gives the example of William Cowper, writing in 1783 about sitting cozily inside by the fire with tea and a newspaper, with the winter world as something pleasing to behold from the warmth of the indoors. But then we also have Coleridge and the other Romantics and the idea of sublime nature, and there's also lots of interesting stuff about Caspar David Friedrich and other Germans, and Russians too, taking up winter and the love of winter as something that separates their cultures from the French. I love Gopnik's style and exuberance: at one point when he's writing about "the eroticism of winter" in Russian literature and culture he says that "it's all tied up in furs and snows and secrets"; Tchaikovsky's music is "winter made exquisite" (26, 38).

I liked the Romantic Winter section of the book best, but the rest of the sections all had their excellent bits, too. And throughout, Gopnik's own love of winter comes through and enriches the writing. Mmm. This was just the kind of smart and engaged nonfiction I was in the mood for.

[Terzah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winter is not the season of my discontent. It's my favorite. I've always loved the austere beauty, the exhilaration of being outdoors and the coziness of being indoors, the sleepiness, the rich food, and of course Christmas, that fulcrum of the calendar when the light begins to return (never mind that I don't actually like the long hot summer days that the light returning portends!). Maybe it's because my birthday is in January.

Adam Gopnik, who wrote this tour of the artists, writers, singers, explorers and others who have asked and answered questions about winter or who have celebrated and lamented it, didn't disappoint: "My heart jumps when I hear a storm predicted...my smile rises when cold weather is promised....Gray skies and December lights are my idea of secret joy, and if there were a heaven, I would expect it to have a lowering violet-gray sky...and white lights on all the trees and the first flakes just falling, and it would always be December 19--the best day of the year, school out, stores open late, Christmas a week away."

He then goes on to chart the various roles winter plays in our consciousness, beginning with the romance of it, moving onto the explorers of the Far North, and from there into Christmas, ice hockey (Gopnik grew up in Canada) and ending with the idea of winter as the season of memory. I enjoyed almost everything about this book, not least that it made me listen to some music I'd never heard before.

The last chapter was almost sad. This is partly because Gopnik as a "humanist" (read "atheist") believes us all to be as transitory as snowflakes. Therefore, he opines, the meaning we ascribe to anything, including winter, will die when we as both individuals and as a species are finished. He calls this his sense that "the entirety of the universe could have been made--was made--without purpose, that is cold, spinning, unconscious, neither kind nor cruel, just following laws that are in the end not even laws, just regularities produced by the cycling of chances. A vast, empty room, with no one home....We are inside, naming and making, while outside the world doesn't give a damn; yet we persuade ourselves that it's a season bound by many symbols, a Christmas card picture, a thing, a state, a friend. It's winter."

I don't share that sense and I don't agree with that bleak view. But I do agree with the other reason the last chapter is sad: I, like Gopnik, worry that global warming will end winter. I hope my anecdotal sense that it doesn't snow as frequently, or as early, or get or stay as cold as it once did, is wrong. If it's right, we really will be left only with winter as a memory. It wasn't something we began...but it is something I fear we are ending.

[Ygraine · Rating 2 out of 5]

“there are moments when we can experience winter as, in effect, the universe experiences it: loveless and emotionless and just there, an endless cycling of physical law that is not just indifferent to our feelings but in some sense so arbitrary that it doesn’t even have the quality of being elemental. there are moments when i almost think that i sense, with fear, the reality of the cosmos as it is: just this big, huge nothing, billions of years old, without segments or seasons or anything in it, where the truth of the universe is just that it brutally is. we live in a cold world.

but instead we give the coldness names, we write it poetry, we play it music, we experience it as a personality — and this is and remains the act of humanism. armed with that hope, we see not waste and cold but light and mystery and wonder and something called january. we see not stilled atoms in a senseless world. we see winter.”

i think gopnik is right, in the fifth and final of these chapters, formerly lectures, to say that at its core this book is a list of the things he does and does not like, set in the structure of a sort of anthropological, sort of literary critical, sort of philosophical sequence of essays.

this is a book full of very sweeping and sometimes slightly wobbly claims about human nature, about the sensibilities of entire eras, about interpreted meanings of texts that i think suffers by its proximity to my reading of sontag's against interpretation; i feel how unfair i'm being, because this is a book in an entirely different form, taking an entirely different voice and working with an entirely different set of thoughts to entirely different ends, but i think coming from sontag's almost brutal intellectual rigour and refusal to accept conventional or prosaic thought, so much of this book felt surface-level in its analysis and flabby in its prose. i think it's a valiant attempt at approaching the hugeness of winter in thought, experience and memory, but it chooses to skate across the surface of that hugeness in a way that didn't satisfy me.

[Kathleen (itpdx) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gopnik presented a series of lectures. This book is a written version of those lectures. He calls it cultural observations themed around winter. His winters are about snow and ice. He grew up in Montreal after all. He starts with the mini ice age and the arrival of central heat, which he thinks changed our perception of winter. We could stand in a mini Serengeti and look through the glass at winter. We could venture out knowing that we could return to safety. He explores the artistic representations of winter from that time, pictorial and written. Then he moves on to the polar expeditions in radical and permanent winter. He discusses the development of our current Christmas celebrations. He takes up recreational winter, mainly looking at urban winter recreation--skating and hockey. And then he explores what it might mean to us if we loose winter via climate change.

His oservations are interesting and thought provoking. Sometimes it is obvious that this was originally conceived as something to be spoken. There are sentences with asides that are hard to follow on the page. He is so enthusiastic about hockey and its history that I expect in person he could have carried me through that portion of the book where I lost interest.

I live in an area, western Oregon, where winter (and fall and spring) mean rain with only very occasional appearances of snow and ice, and where winter recreation usually involves driving an hour or so to the mountains. So Gopnik is writing about a form of winter that is different than my experience.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it, although the lecture focusing on hockey is a bit much for a non-fan. Hoping to be able to hear Gopnik (who grew up in Montreal) read these Massey lectures when he does so on the CBC in November (via the internet?) I like the last lecture, about winter and memory, best, and it ends so:

"'I wish I had a river I could skate away on,'" Joni Mitchell tells us, lost in Los Angeles as she longs for snows once known. Ou sont les neiges d'antan? Where are the old snows? Inside us, where they remain compressed, perhaps frozen, but still capable of being forced out from memory and finely articulated, or at least sweetly sung. Where did they go? Inside us, where they remain, as winter remains my favorite season. I still see the boy at the window, my own otherwise lost self, and feel him thinking, 'Oh, a new place, the ice palace, the river, my home -- my new home -- look at the snow falling, hear how quiet it gets!' For the time being, at least, the snow still falls, and the world, like this speaker, is given the winter gift of silence."

[Marla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot. It is idiosyncratic, erudite, and well-written, despite having been also given as a series of lectures. I learned a lot about winter from many perspectives, and was fascinated by the research tidbits that Gopnik shared. I found myself searching for photos of art and listening to music that Gopnik wrote about. In fact, I listened to the entire Four Season's by Vivaldi (not just Winter) as an accompaniment! Worth reading!

[Bill Hammack · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had read Adam's Gopnik's Paris to the Moon and thoroughly enjoyed it. I picked up this book - Winter - to celebrate the arrival of the season. I started it on December 21st. It is based - or perhaps actually is - the CBC Massey Lectures he gave in 2011. I enjoyed every page of the book: It is so well written, but effortless; filled with facts, but always pellucid. I was worried that the hockey section would bore me, yet I found his take on the sport fascinating.

[dv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Libro splendido, al tempo stesso dotto, curioso ed emozionante. Cinque storie che dicono dell'inverno costruendo trame e vicende che uniscono mondi, intrecciano le vite di personaggi, illustrano e musicano grazie a opere d'arte. Gopnik conosce i segreti del rendere un saggio un racconto dal quale è impossibile staccarsi.

[Perri · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars. This was self-indulgent writing, meandering, and you really don't come away learning much from this book.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to “Winter” from hockey, which is fitting. Hockey is a winter sport, a winter creation: one of the many ways that humans have sought to engage the blankness of the dead season, an expanse of slippery ice, and use it as our canvas, our mirror, reflecting our own image back into an uncaring void. This book is about how we humans (of the European variety, in any case) make everything about ourselves, even in a universe that, manifestly, is not about us at all.

I enjoyed “Winter: Five Windows on the Season” more than I thought I would; initially I borrowed it from the library, but when I was less than a chapter into it I purchased my own copy, which I have since adorned with innumerable scribbles and post-its. Gopnik’s text is dense with allusions; those as little-read as I will find it helpful to have browser near at hand. You will learn some things, only a few of which I have space to touch on below. “Winter” is a very rewarding read.

The subtitle’s “five windows” represent five paths of inquiry, five scavenger hunts, five different directions that Gopnik takes in his examination of our relationship with winter. The window itself represents, for Gopnik, that moment when we first stood inside our newly heated homes and looked out through the glass at the winter scenery--that moment when winter changed from being a thing endured to being a thing considered, engaged, imagined.

This moment dawned during the Romantic era, and “Romantic Winter” is Gopnik’s first window. With its roots in the mini-Ice Age that Europe experienced from 1550-1850, Romantic Winter, as portrayed by painter Caspar David Friedrich, composer Fanny Mendelssohn and others, became enmeshed with Northern Europe’s assertion of its identity. In revolt against France and the Enlightenment, the northern artist employed winter as “the poster scene of a national revival,” embracing its darkness, its storms and its cold; fascinated by the absence of vegetation that allowed him and her to see nature as she really is: minus the frills, the decorations, the adornments--ultimately, perhaps, minus God.

“Radical Winter” is Gopnik’s second window. Through it he sees the shadow of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, “the modern Prometheus,” in the polar expeditions, particularly that of the Englishman Robert F. Scott. Here the European takes on the blankness of the polar region, the enormity of its frozen indifference, and attempts not only to define and label its geography, but to imprint upon it his own character. As predictably as Frankenstein’s creation of the monster, this leads to tragedy, but it is tragedy on the explorer’s own terms. The polar expeditions represented, says Gopnik via Norman Mailer, “the WASP dream of doing things for their own sake, as a purely existential test of the national and personal will.” “The bad times,” continues Gopnik, “were real, but so was the ‘cleanness,’ the absence of sordid motives.” We may well laugh at Scott & co. in delicate communion with their silver tea service in a flimsy tent on the edge of death in the raging Antarctic, but along with the tea they brought a sort of clean, gentlemanly aesthetic. Neither piece of baggage served their stated goal particularly well, but their combined futility and comedic aspects, stiffened by unquestionable courage, form a picture of the human condition in Radical Winter: our meeting with the elements stretching us as far to the extreme as we can possibly go. There’s more: I could go on, but I’ll let you read it yourself, and if you read only one chapter of “Winter,” I recommend this one.

“Recuperative Winter” is largely about changing views of our winter festival, that is to say, Christmas, examined broadly and (for the most part) secularly. Gopnik begins with the dualism expressed by the twin Roman winter solstice festivals Saturnalia and Kalends--the reversal feast vs. the renewal feast--that still, to his mind, confuses us today. He places the birth of the modern holiday in the hands of Charles Dickens, in Scrooge’s dilemma between capitalism and charity. Scrooge wakes up from his famous dream renewed by a sense of caring and connection. After World War I and its “Christmas truce,” this domestic Victorian Christmas ideal becomes, grown fuzzy through nostalgia, entrenched (no pun intended) as the measure of the holiday. Faced in more recent times with an alarming abundance, we search frantically for renewal in the reversal, and we don’t find it. As Gopnik says, “the material festival turns out to be a fake...the earth does renew itself; we don’t.” Which is why the symbol of the newborn baby is so potent at mid-winter, and perhaps the reason that, as the song goes, “Christmas is for children.”

In “Recreational Winter,” Gopnik makes the case that our engagement with winter in the form of sport connects us to our most basic instincts, those that point us towards sex and violence. While the velocity of ice travel allows us to remove ourselves from our fellows in pursuit of the solitary and the soulful, the heat and speed generated by cold-weather sport, Gopnik argues, has a sexual edge that invites involvement. The sexuality--whether expressed by young women in the 19th century or homosexual men in the 20th, is rendered acceptable because of the healthful effects of the activity that masks it. But the impulse toward solitude--Gopnik calls it “freelancing”--is somehow more threatening within an industrialist, factory-oriented society, and team sport arises to suppress it. This inevitably brings Gopnik around to his dear hockey, in which he finds echoes of both themes: solitude vs. social involvement, and sexuality: expressed, perceived, repressed. He writes, “we race into the corners of the pond and find there the corners of our own minds.” Dr. Freud, call your office.

In “Remembering Winter,” Gopnik finally gets around to addressing the elephant in the room, the gigantic, ever-expanding behemoth known as global climate change. Will winter cease entirely to be? Are we exterminating it? And, what are the ways in which we have already forsaken it? What are the implications of abandoning winter, of ignoring it, of neglecting to engage it? For Gopnik, winter is many things, but, perhaps most poignantly to this grown-up school-girl, he calls the experience of winter “a snow day...a day a child spends outside of normal time.” What is the unquantifiable value of that experience? What is its measure once it is gone? What emptiness does it leave behind?

Winter symbolizes the moment that we, as humans, stare into the void of the universe--into the void of our own minds, individual and collective--and describe, discriminate, seek, move, create. Thus, it is potentially a moment of joy, of abandon, of ecstasy. You may call this humanist hubris; Gopnik calls it our attempt to “manufacture our love...our need for [winter].” Whatever you call it, I find this book to be a fascinating meditation not only on winter, but on “the northern consciousness” and on our connection with the physical and metaphysical form of the universe.

[Brother Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

These were lectures that Adam Gopnik taught now transcribed in a book as I understand it.

I felt that these were very well written and fun to read, especially Chapter 2 which had a very poetic and flowery kind of language. In these lectures, Gopnik writes about the experience of winter – the contrast between it's brute force on one side of the window, but it's beauty and magic from the inside. He also writes about the history of Christmas in the contemporary Western scene and how it has cause the "empire of the winter holiday" to move from continent to continent (even in places where snow doesn't exist, snow is fabricated). Christmas and winter have become so deeply intertwined.

[Sophy H · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hmm, I find this type of writing completely lazy to be honest.

Gopnik takes the subject of winter, finds every book possibly relating to or mentioning winter and literally regurgitates vast swathes of text from those books, endlessly quoting various authors. It reminds me of when we had to do critical reviews of literature at uni.

There seems to be no original thought at all apart from a clunky chapter on ice sports:- hockey, skating etc (eugh, boring!)

I skim read most of the book and ended thinking thank f**k for that!

Straight to the charity shop with this one.

[Mari Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winter is fundamentally a book on Western history, beginning in Europe and tracing increasingly to Canada in the later chapters. It celebrates winter in these countries so thoroughly that by the end you feel winter stress is crucial for something sweet, that summer is monotonous and amnesiac, and without winter one might be missing a certain mettle, rawness, philosophy, or purity. Gopnik examines notions of winter, particularly in Germany, and its opposition to the rationality of the French 'summer' enlightenment. He examines the pride, often national, perhaps even racial, that comes with winter. If examining a 'clash of seasons' why not examine how notions of winter superiority were weaponized in racist, colonial thought against winter-less regions? Or how people from the wintry north often flee to poorer, warm countries with colonial histories? Considering Gopnik mentioned writing at least the last section of the book in the Caribbean, while escaping the very winter he discusses (this part he acknowledges as ironic), surely such a phenomenon warrants deeper thought. Near the end of the book racist wintry superiority finally, starkly appears:

"'Genius,' Nabokov once wrote, 'resembles an African imagining snow.' And memory, he might have added, looks like an amusement park in winter."

Nabokov's quote resoundingly demonstrates the way European philosophies of winter can be deeply racist and it goes entirely un-interrogated by Gopnik! I'm reminded of an earlier section where Gopnik recounts how long, grueling Montreal winters nearly brought a Haitian cabdriver of his to tears. Gopnik extensively investigated the philosophy and perspectives of German immigrants (familiar with a German Romantic concept of winter) in a young Canada. Surely that could be extended, however briefly, to other immigrants experiencing winter.

Gopnik addresses a very particular in-group, notable in the philosophy of the book and reinforced with the repetitive thumping of the word ‘we’.

"And this at a time when most other imperial and colonial expeditions have melted from glory into shame. We look now at the exploration of Africa, the search for the source of the Nile, the search for the heart of the Congo, with at best ambivalence and more often simple guilt."

Who exactly is the 'we' is in the above quote? "at best" for whom? While this statement may be intended as descriptive (of the perspective of a particular set of people) it seems to reveal a thoughtless personal view, ultimately painting a simplistic, asinine view of how violent colonial histories are and should be (to him) viewed. The death and brutal torture of millions in the Congo should not be viewed with mere ‘simple’ guilt let alone ambivalence.

Gopnik acknowledges the way Inuit people hover around the edges of daring European polar expedition stories, surviving on their own merits and supporting polar explorers with no credit. He recapitulates this very structure, as indigenous and POC people seep into his work with little examination or consideration.

“To mock Scott is easy, and many people do. When we read through his diary with its firm stiff-upper-lip-ness, when we look through his claims, we see something that seems very remote from us, something that can even seem to us, well, spoiled — tainted by the eternal condescension of the European to everything outside himself. We can't accuse Scott in this case of being an imperialist, a colonizer; there was no one there to imperialize or colonize except those penguins — whose eggs did indeed get stolen and taken back by one of the youngest members of his final expedition south…. But besides those emperor penguin eggs, there was very little colonial damage done to the South Pole. And yet there is a whole literature today in which poststructuralist and postmodern critics go after Scott's scalp for his stiff-upper-lip-ness, for his condescension, and see that final, doomed expedition as summing up all the ills of imperialism. It's true that Scott was an English gentleman, with the vices and virtues of his kind. He was incompetent, he was condescending, and he was locked into the cliches of his class, though no more than you and I or the average college professor is locked into the cliches of ours. He was also courageous and gallant right to the end, and those two things — the condescension and the courage — run together....”

Gopnik overlooks the structural for the particular. He fails to see how the attitude polar explorers had, Scott included, was steeped in the mentality of colonialism and imperialism. While in this case there may have been very few people to hurt or resources to take, the goal was to map, conquer, and extract. It’s telling Scott stole and sold the children of the only living beings on the continent. Gopnik explains colonial attitudes as the cliches of an Englishman and emphasizes our own blind biases and enmeshment in the society we live in. Our enmeshment can be examined and better understood. Our biases can be sought out, contextualized, and criticized. We can write from our perspectives, but should not mistake them as universal.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF after 20 pages of ok writing the author slipped in a sentence about stripping nature to her underwear to more effectively project fantasies onto her and I was like, oh right this is why I mostly read women. Thanks for the reminder, Adam, I hate it!

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I strongly recommend Adam Gopnik’s “Winter” I had the pleasure of listening to him read the book, actually its a series of lectures, on Canadian Broadcast Corporation Radio designated as the annual George Massey Lectures some years ago. Looking out at the snow on the local mountains here in Canada I recognize, as does Mr Gopnik, that Winter (often experienced here for a good deal of the year) is something that we must deal with both on a mental and physical level and be reconciled with it as this book so wonderfully states. Mr Gopnik as an American grew up in Canada and has thoughtful insights into our (and his) unique winter psyche. He quotes composers, poets,authors, philosophers, thinkers,and he injects wonderful art work depicting winter, (especially Caspar David Friedrich to heighten the special Northern European Winter ethos). Winter is the time of contemplation and memory; there is memory IN Winter and memory OF Winter; recollections, loss and longing are closer to the surface for some reason and staring into the fire-place evoke memory unlike any other season. Winter asks us to look through that window pane that separates us from the snow and cold but like any window it is two-sided, winter beckons us to renew our spirit of childishness and go play with the assurance that we may return to the warmth of the fire-place.
Adam asks the uniquely Canadian question with a hilarious answer: " What happens to all woolie hats/toques of all Canadian children? ...they are lost to some vast repository of wool that will one day be recovered and used to re-cloth the sheep of the world!"

[Lari Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book hoping it would point me towards a few new (to me) winter legends and folktales, but it didn’t. I don’t mind though, because it was a wonderful read anyway. It’s in the form of five lectures about winter, including chapters about the wonderful heroic madness of the men who chased the permanent winter of the Poles, the history of Christmas (our modern image of Santa apparently comes from a cartoon character supporting the Union in the US Civil War), the Romantic notion of the beauty of winter (a chapter which was very reminiscent of one of my favourite books, Mountains of the Mind by Robert MacFarlane) and slightly more information on ice hockey than I’ve ever needed during a chapter of the history and meaning of winter sports. This is a mix of science, art, philosophy and musings on the most brutal and beautiful of seasons. Read the gorgeous hardback by a warm fire with snow outside, or wait for the paperback and pop it in your rucksack to read on a winter walk…

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I chose to read this collection of Massey Lectures broadcast on CBC Radio to satisfy the Keyword Challenge hosted by Bev at My Reader’s Block. I also thought that with some insight on this frigid season, I could learn to dislike it a little less.

The five windows or views of winter that Gopnik considers are: Romantic Winter, Radical Winter, Recuperative Winter, Recreational Winter, and Remembering Winter.

This book is a fascinating mix of history, art, science, religion, popular culture, and philosophy and flows like a great lecture should. I highly recommend it.

Read this if: you’re a fellow winter-survivor and want to have ‘warmer’ feelings about this difficult season; you’re one of that unusual specie – a winterphile and want factoids to dazzle and convince your friends that you’re not insane; or you’re a lucky warm-weather inhabitant and want a taste of what the big chill is all about. 4½ stars

Thanks to Buried in Print who first tipped me to this book.

[Lauren Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted so very much to like this book, as I enjoy Gopnik's writing and, more to the point, I was raised in Quebec where we say, "winter is my country." Gopnik's research is excellent, but I found his approach to the essays didn't allow him enough hooks to hang his personal hat, if you know what I mean. He is at his best when his insight and wit are applied to his own life, his observations about his surroundings and his fellow humans. Here, he explores concepts of winter -- romantic, radical, recuperative, recreational and the last, called (with a bit of a thunk), "remembering". He looks at history, science, art and literature, but fails to do the very things I hoped he would do, which is to evoke the season and to illumine it through the lens of his experience. This is more a history of winter than anything else. While there is much to admire in his thoroughness, in the end I only longed for actual winter all the more.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Print version of his Massey Lectures. Meandering cultural history of the concept of Winter. Fun to dip into now and again. Mostly centered about Western Civ, he goes from 18th C to current day. Romantic vs Enlightenment, central heating, polar expeditions, hockey, Santa and Christmas, a nice bit on Dickens, and urban planning/architecture. Illustrated. Extensive Bibliography, but sadly (and oddly) there was not much I wanted to add to my Reading List from it. A fair amount of overstatement (lots of "the greatest" this that and the other - especially his long spiel on hockey!), and statement without proof (well, these are lectures). An interesting read, leaves you with the odd fact here and there, and some creative thinking on his part to tie the season in with cultures and Art. And, his books are always well written, challenging, and informative. Looking forward to reading "The Table Comes First" soon.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Adam Gopnik's occasional contributions to BBC Radio 4's A Point of View for their pithy insightfulness and their wisdom. Those elements are both features of this fascinating study of the cultural history of the modern winter. The book arose out of a series of lectures Gopnik gave on the subject in his native Canada, and that format is (as he explains in a prefatory note) left largely unaltered for publication in book form. It works very well, giving his arguments a personal and engaging tone. The book is packed with facts and unusual angles on familiar themes. Winter entertains, informs and prompts reflection - which is pretty much the magic formula for a non-fiction book in my opinion!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gopnik writes 5 essays in examination and enjoyment of winter. The essays break down to extreme winter (polar exploration), winter in verse and art, sentimental winter (Christmas), winter sports, and remembering winter. The essays are erudite and his references vary from Goethe, artist Caspar David Friedrich, Goffman, and many others. The academic mixes with passionate hockey in the sport chapter and the entire book makes it unusual but also readable and enjoyable. The difficulty in describing this book might make for a tough sell. Hopefully Gopnik's popularity in his other writings will lead some essay or NF readers to this book.