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Born in Philadelphia, Adam Gopnik grew up and studied in Canada before becoming, in 1986, one of the most appreciated feathers of the prestigious "New Yorker". Lover of Paris, hockey and the art of conversation, he offers with " Winter, five windows on a season ", a non-fiction masterpiece to read by the fireside.
For a long time, says Adam Gopnik at the opening of his first "window", devoted to "the romantic winter", the cold season in Europe was associated with death and emptiness. It was the German romantics who restored it to its former glory. Thus the painter Caspar David Friedrich made snow the decoration of several of his paintings. The individual contemplates there an impassive nature, suitable for accommodating his metaphysical doubts.
The winter of poets and explorers
Winter thus becomes the emblem of the romantic soul opposed to the reason of the Enlightenment. There was even for ten years, says the author, a debate on the Eisblumen , these frost flowers that take shape on the window panes. To those who saw it as the sign of a biological life, Goethe replied that they were only " simple and superficial mineral imitations ".
Towards the end of the 19th century, winter now inhabited the imagination of explorers as well as that of psychoanalysts. They compare our unconscious to the hidden part of the iceberg. This sea monster was to materialize, after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, the modern idea of fate, absurd and insane.
If the conquest of the poles is still a dream today, it is because its image did not “ sink into shame ” of the colonial horrors, continues Adam Gopnik. However, the explorer Robert Peary, who claimed in 1909 to be the first to reach the North Pole, was no less greedy than these tropical alter ego . Fifteen years earlier, he had removed three meteorites revered since time immemorial by the Greenland Inuit who used to make iron out of them to make their tools and weapons. He sold them to the Natural History Museum in New York.
Christmas to conquer the world
“ If there is one thing that we can say with certainty that we do not celebrate on Christmas, notes the author in his second window on winter, it is the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. "Indeed, the latter would have been born in September and the date of December 25 would have been arbitrarily decided in the 4th century. However, it is very close to the winter solstice.
From the religious celebration to the commercial celebration, passing through the imagination of the "Christmas tale" and fraternization in the trenches in December 1914, the author then engages in a scholarly and whirling reverie on a celebration that is now secular, which has made winter a dream in countries where it does not exist.
" The winter festival," he writes, " has now conquered the entire continent : artificial snow, fake ice cubes, frost so prized by Goethe sprayed on Californian windows in honor of a German deity like Goethe could not have imagined : Santa Claus. "
" The snows of yesteryear "
Of winter sports, Adam Gopnik retains mainly hockey and skating, which he recalls that it was formerly a much more widespread practice. " It is purely and simply," he explains, " a question of sex. For city dwellers, skating was one of the few forms of flirtation and expression of sexuality deemed acceptable. "
" This is true for the sexuality of young women of the 19th century and that of homosexuals of the 20th, " he continues. “ As long as homosexuals have been suppressed, oppressed and persecuted, homosexual flirting has been expressed on the ice. "
In its fifth and last window, the tone becomes much darker. How, at this moment in history when climate change seems inevitable, not to think of a possible disappearance of winter in many regions of the world? Without the snow , when will it be in memory? " Winter," he writes, " is in reality and secretly the season in which our sense of the past rests. "
" But where are the snows of yesteryear ?" Sang François Villon. This verse from the Ballad of Ladies of the old days seems “ straight out of its Renaissance frame to serve as a modern refrain. In a world deprived of the cycle of the seasons, will we be condemned to an eternal present?
► Adam Gopnik, Winter, five windows over one season , Éditions Lux (translated by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné). 18 euros.