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The Staten Island book is a selection of the many essays I wrote about Staten Island life while living there.  Not all could be fit into the scope of the published book.  The following one, “Winter,” is one of four essays on the seasons; Autumn is found here.

WINTER

Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent his darksome hours
Weeping and watching for the morrow,
He knows ye not, ye heavenly powers.

– GOETHE

It would be a beautiful thing if aging eyes, which are so likely to look upon snow merely as a hassle to a morning commute, or as so many pounds for a creaking back to shovel, could be made young again and see a snowfall for the first time, as a child of two or three does.  There is no event in the yearly course of city life which is more dramatic in its effects than a snowfall.  It creates an entire new world out of a tired old one. Trees and fields and ponds and streets and houses are transformed –

Nothing of them that doth remain
But doth suffer a snow-change
Into something rich and strange.

Walking through the city parks after a snowstorm one sees children playing and adults taking pictures. Through art adults seek to recapture youth.  Without the transmuting effects of a medium the mature mind is apt to overlook the daily wonder of the world.

One of the fine things about being a teacher is that one still participates in the excitement of snow days. They are like gifts from heaven, a reenactment of the manna that sustained the wandering nation of God, and I do not mean to slight things academic when I say that they are some of the most valuable days in the whole of an education.  Not only is every child forever grateful for their occurrence, but then they are also disposed to spend the day outside in the snow.  There is something beautifully healthy and uplifting about the winter games that children play.  It is a sad childhood that cannot recall some memorable night of sledding, or some great martial exploit on the snowball-fight field.  I may be more or less successful than my friends, and may suffer or fail in the game of riches, but the deeds of my right arm cannot be taken from me.  Who were Achilles and Diomedes but murderers?  It is more glorious to conquer with a snowball than a stone.

The snowmen that invariably appear at this time are signs of another lofty impulse.  All art arises from such childish inclinations.  It is said that Lorenzo de’ Medici had Michelangelo sculpt him some snowmen in the Boboli gardens, one of those curious facts of history that remind us that all our works perish, and yet they are worth something to the world if there is anything noble in us.  What man would not wish those ice-sculptures preserved in some nobler medium?  Yet Carrara marble cannot last forever either.  In two thousand years perhaps only the name of Michelangelo will survive, to remind man of his possibilities.  Of the great Greek sculptors, not a single full-sized statue of their own workmanship survives.  We begin as Praxiteles must have, with snowmen and sand castles.  What if they should perish?  The work of beauty continues, if the works of beauty fade away.

When the snow has melted, and the snow-men are merely lingering stumps of whiteness, winter wears a spartan cloak of brown leaves and bark.  The vegetable world seems to approximate again the soil from which it was taken.  One sees the rocks in their outcrops, no longer shielded by the creeping vines of summer.  Staten Island has the highest hills in the city, and the most exposed bedrock.  On the rocks are imprinted reminders of the deeper cycles that encourage a man to consider the millennia.  Not long ago Staten Island’s climate was entirely inhospitable to human life.  The South-eastern half of the island owes its topography of rolling hills and small ponds to the glaciation of North America; it is the terminal moraine of the glacier, which acted as a great broom, sweeping the scourings of a continent into a heap at the edge of the sea.  Such a titanic footprint upon the landscape is enough to make one think about the smallness and fragility of our lives before Nature, who is like a sleeping Giant who awakes at long intervals, and strides over our cities as we stride over an anthill.  Fifteen thousand years ago it is said that the ice lay a thousand feet thick over Manhattan island.  All throughout the Northeast of America entire mountain ranges were ground down to stumps.  The bedrock of the island bears deep scratches, all parallel to one another, as if someone had been dragging a thousand-ton boiler over the hills.  The giants of Nature take different forms in different places: in California they sleep under the earth, and shake it when they awake; beneath Vesuvius or Rainier are fire-wielding Vulcans; in the Caribbean there are wind-giants, who ride the Hurricanes; but for us in New York the most powerful giants are the bearded ice-gods of the North, whom we have never seen, but whose tracks we have learned to recognize.  Though they now live above Hudson Bay, they have been known to range down this far.

It is a remarkable fact that the glaciation in the Old World, even in a place like Siberia which has given its name to bitter ice-age weather, was not as extensive as it was in the New.  It is thought that the Atlantic Ocean somehow affects the process of glaciation, for it has historically been near the largest ice sheets.  But it is not known.  Today America still has far more bitter winters than any other temperate part of the world. Albany shares the same latitude as Barcelona and Naples; the latitude of Edinburgh or Helsinki, which are cold but quite inhabitable, is not far from that of the New World’s Baffin Island, whose landscape resembles that of Mars, fifty million miles further away from the sun.

But in New York we have a remarkably pleasant geographical situation, and and it is almost always five degrees warmer here than any of the surrounding areas.  And winter is not as cold as it used to be, when the fastest way from New York to Albany in this season used to be on the frozen Hudson River, which was the main post-route for many years.  But winter is still a long season, and has in it something of the ice-age, and an intimation of even more lifeless epochs.  The brilliancy of the snow-lit morning, which is so exciting to child and teacher, soon fades.  The snowfalls are few and far between, and the snow that remains grows black and disgusting, run over by too many wheels and visited by too many dogs.  What had begun as a grace from heaven, pure and immaculate, becomes a sign of our fallen nature.  The hours of daylight are so few, and the colors of nature so gray and brown, and the winds so cold and biting and penetrating, that, if left alone, we are apt to lapse into melancholy.

So we balance the pains of winter with the pleasures of companionship and culture.  We light our candles and decorate our hearths; we head out to concerts or bring home a movie; and we turn more than ever to our friends and our family.  The long evenings make for long dinners and long parties, or for long letters and long memories.  We consider once more the things we have been taught and too often forget, the precepts of our religion and the brevity of our lives; we give more freely of our earnings and our time.  And we see how little we are accustomed to give, and how many still are in want, for in winter nights we learn again that many of our fellows spend their nights without a roof or a bed to shelter them.  How I have felt for them, as I wrapped my scarf more tightly around my neck, waiting for the train on the windy platform in the dead of night!  How long shall it be, Lord, before I will have provided enough for myself, and may begin to provide for others?  When shall I not need to take from my fellows, but be able to give to them?

And so when all the natural world is dormant around us, we are sensible to something deeper than all the world of plants and animals.  The stars shine more brightly in the crisp night air, so that even we New Yorkers can see them, and we remember that the eternal things have always been there, waiting for the day that we should recognize them, behind the smog and rain and bright lights of daily living.