Thousands of Bergen County residents continue to carry on without power to their homes. In Franklin Lakes, the Ambulance Building was opened to residents who needed emergency shelter, and in Wyckoff the Public Library was made available to residents in distress. Some homes were not expected to get power restored till the beginning of the week. Accidents, detours, postponements, unending hours of shoveling, blowing, and plowing can take all the joy out of snow fast.
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Perhaps snow is better in art. Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in The Snow from the 16th century Bruegel shows a snow-covered valley full of ponds, a river, snow covered houses, churches, people working, playing. It looks beautiful.
It looks beautiful in other photographs, paintings, poems, and stories throughout history. It does not look good when it brings down your power lines, clogs your roads, and turns your town into a frozen wasteland. Snow is so much better in art when it reflects a feeling or emotion.
The haunting image from James Joyce’s short story The Dead reflects a feeling shared by many residents in the area. The story ends with snow falling all over the island as the protaganist slips into sleep, “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Snow acts a time-glass as the narrator stops to watch the woods fill up with snow, the snow piles higher as time slips away, and…
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
In music, Vivalidi’s Winter Concerto in f-minor was supposedly based upon a sonnet which he also authored. The texture of this concerto is seasoned with staccato notes from the high strings, calling to mind the silvery, icy rain.
“Shivering, frozen mid the frosty snow in biting, stinging winds;
running to and fro to stamp one’s icy feet, teeth chattering in the bitter chill.
To rest contentedly beside the hearth, while those outside are drenched by pouring rain.
We tread the icy path slowly and cautiously, for fear of tripping and falling.
Then turn abruptly, slip, crash on the ground and, rising, hasten on across the ice lest it cracks up.
We feel the chill north winds coarse through the home despite the locked and bolted doors
this is winter, which nonetheless brings its own delights.”
Below The Journal offers another classic, but less classical, videos of snow in art as an eight year old girl performs a song she authored entitled Snow Day.
