Massey Lecture series on winter blows into town
EDMONTON - Some of us fear its arrival. Others escape it altogether, fleeing to Arizona or Mexico for half the year. A good portion of the population has built a life in opposition to it: house to garage to underground parking lot and back again. Most of us just complain about it the way we complain about most things: superficially. We greet the predictions, this week, that Canada is in for uncommonly cold air and deep piles of snow in a month or two, with sadness if not horror.
Still, even when we pretend we aren’t winter people, we’re winter people.
When the organizers of the Massey Lectures invited writer Adam Gopnik to deliver and publish this year’s five-part essay, he didn’t hesitate.
“I know it doesn’t sound fully credible but I thought of winter immediately after receiving the invitation,” he said, on the phone from New York City last week, his distinctive voice slightly nasal with an autumn cold. “It comes up again and again, in my own work. I’m drawn to winter, and nobody had written a cultural history of winter.”
The elegant and fascinating result is Winter: Five Windows on the Season. It’s in bookstores already, but Gopnik has only recited the five essays in his Manhattan apartment, before a small focus group of family and friends.
The CBC will record the 50th anniversary Massey Lectures for broadcast in early November. Stop No. 1 is in Gopnik’s hometown of Montreal with the first window on the season: Romantic Winter. Then Gopnik is off to Halifax for part 2, Radical Winter.
On Friday, Oct. 21, Gopnik will deliver the third window on the season, Recuperative Winter, in Edmonton.
“I absolutely insisted on Montreal and Edmonton,” he said.
The lectures are dedicated to an Edmontonian, one of Canada’s pioneering female film directors, Bjerring Gudrun Parker, his mother-in-law. Gopnik’s wife Martha’s family is in Edmonton. His brother-in-law, Ed Struzik, is an award-winning author and an Edmonton Journal writer.
Every chapter in Winter throws a Canadian into a sea of thoughtfulness. In the first essay, Gopnik explores his own early memories of winter, that first Montreal snowstorm, and insinuates himself into the minds of the great artists, philosophers, poets and composers who developed our early ideas of winter, ideas that probably determined our culture more than any other phenomenon: the inside-outside romance of the season, fearful and sublime.
Radical Winter is about the polar explorers, physical and intellectual, whose stories continue to fascinate us. Though it was often the end of them, the early explorers always took their culture with them. “We can flee civilization on snowshoes,” Gopnik writes, in the book version, “but she will always entrap us in the end.”
Recuperative Winter, the essay Gopnik will deliver in Edmonton, is about Christmas and all its cultural tentacles: historical, religious and secular, artistic and philosophical. While he is a secular man, Gopnik said he often wonders why Christmas is so cheering, so moving, so central to his life — so sacred.
“Christmas drives us crazy,” he writes, “because it asks us to be just the same and yet completely different, and all on one day. No wonder it is the best day of the year — and, for many, the worst.”
In Recreational Winter, Gopnik turns to his favourite sport: hockey. Here, Gopnik undermines some of our romantic notions about ice-skating and hockey as rural activities. “[F]ar from being a simple rural sport, a kind of pastoral child of winter and ponds, it is above all a city sport, and it’s made in the strange crucible of the growing Canadian cities. Through city pressures and city privileges, the game we know gets made, and in particular it gets forged from the melting pot of Irish, English and French attitudes in my hometown of Montreal.”
A curious Edmontonian could read each of the five chapters of Winter from a very local point of view: artistically, mythologically, pragmatically. At the moment, politicians and industrialists are talking about using a city sport to reimagine and rebuild the city. Remembering Winter, the fifth window on the season, is more transparently about what it means to be a winter city or winter people.
“Winter,” he said, “makes for a richer urban life.”
That is, if you’re willing to be honest about winter, to embrace it, as Canada’s most urban city — Montreal — has done. At the moment, Edmonton is in the midst of a transformation to that end. This will never be Montreal but, we learn from Gopnik, a successful winter city is a successful city.
His guiding metaphor, as the Massey Lecture nears its conclusion, is ice wine: sweetness made from stress.
“And in that simple paradox — the hardest weather makes the nicest wine — lies a secret that gives shape to the winter season, and to our feelings about it,” Gopnik writes and, very soon, speaks. “Without the stress of cold in a temperate climate, without the cycle of the seasons experienced not as a gentle swell up and down but as an extreme lurch, bang! from one quadrant of the year to the next, a compensatory pleasure would vanish from the world.”
tbabiak@edmontonjournal.com
