WINTER OF DESPAIR
Literature rewritten from the depths of February in Toronto.
Temperatures double digits below zero to start the week. Double-digit snowfall by mid-week. The month kicked off with a groundhog predicting six more weeks of winter while hard experience tells Torontonians to expect winter to persist long beyond that.
It is enough to make one want to hide away from the weather; to sleep, perchance to dream . . . of what literature might be like written from the depths of February in Toronto. The Old Man and The Snow after Ernest Hemingway
He was an old man who shovelled alone on a sidewalk in the blizzard and he had gone more than four hours now without finishing the walk . . .
I cleared that snow that fell on my ground, he thought. And it was the biggest snowfall that I have ever seen. And God knows that I have seen big ones. It was too good to last, he thought. The snow fell again and again. I wish it had been a dream now and that I had never picked up that shovel and was alone in bed on the newspapers.
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be frozen solid but not defeated.” The Waste Land after T.S. Eliot
February is the cruelest month, breeding
Depression out of the dead land, mixing Memory and despair, stirring Relentless drab with winter sleet Howl after Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best pants of my generation destroyed by salt stains, corroded ghostly bleached, dragging their cuffs through the frozen streets at dawn scraping up an angry blotch . . . The Trial after Franz Kafka
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was forced to drive in Toronto after it snowed. Fear and Loathing in Moss Park after Hunter S. Thompson We were somewhere around Cabbagetown on the edge of the valley when the sleet began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit cold; maybe we should hop a streetcar . . . ” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge gelatinous seagulls, all swooping and splashing and slopping down toward our feet, which were soggy and pruned and numb through to the bone inside our boots. 1984 after George Orwell
The purpose of Winterspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits common to the residents of Toronto, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every description of the cold that an elevator rider could properly wish to express, while excluding all other topics of conversation and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. The Mittenmaid’s Tale after Margaret Atwood
We were the people who were not in the sun. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of snowbanks. It gave us frostbite. We lived in the gaps between the piles. Waiting for the Streetcar after Samuel Beckett ESTRAGON: Charming spot. Chilling prospects. Let’s go. VLADIMIR: We can’t. ESTRAGON: Why not? VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for the streetcar.
ESTRAGON: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure it was here? VLADIMIR: What? ESTRAGON: That we were to wait. VLADIMIR: They said by the shelter. (They look at the shelter.) Do you see any others? ESTRAGON: What is it? VLADIMIR: I don’t know. A glass panel. ESTRAGON: Where are the walls? VLADIMIR: It’s so cold. ESTRAGON: No more weeping. VLADIMIR: The wind just whips along. It is no shelter at all. ESTRAGON: Looks to me more like a billboard. VLADIMIR: A window. ESTRAGON: A billboard. VLADIMIR: A—. What are you insinuating? That we’ve come to the wrong place? ESTRAGON: It should be here. VLADIMIR: They didn’t say for sure it’d come.
ESTRAGON: And if it doesn’t come? VLADIMIR: We’ll come back tomorrow. ESTRAGON: And then the day after tomorrow. VLADIMIR: Possibly. ESTRAGON: And so on. Portrait of the Commuter as a Late Man after James Joyce
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a snowplow coming down along the road and this snowplow that was coming down along the road made a nicens giant bank blocking the end of baby tuckoo’s freshly cleared driveway. A Tale of 6 City after Charles Dickens
It was the best of snows, it was the worst of snows, it was the age of wind chill, it was the age of slush, it was the epoch of toques, it was the epoch of wet socks, it was the season of grey, it was the season of grey, it was the autumn of hope, it was the winter of despair. Did I already say despair? It was the winter of despair. Room after Emma Donaghue
“Cold is what you’re feeling,” says Ma. “But freezing is what you’re doing.”