There was a barometric minimum over the Atlantic. ”This is how“ The Man Without Qualities ”begins.
I could have shamelessly borrowed Musil's Incipit to start one of the chapters of “The Anomaly”, especially since one of the characters is called Miesel (Victor), which is not far from Musil (Robert).
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The literature offers many meteorological beginnings of novels. My favorite is Gustave Flaubert's with this “deserted” boulevard Bourdon, on which his two characters Bouvard and Pécuchet are exposed to a temperature of 33 degrees Celsius. Writers love meteorology, and if they expose their characters to a certain humidity, a certain air pressure in the first sentence, it is not just for simple narrative reasons. Because the color of the sky says something to the reader, because "this weather" will be the natural metaphor for the atmosphere (again a metaphor) of the novel from the start.
The “Odyssey” or “Moby Dick” are also inconceivable without the anger of the elements, and the storm is always fruitful for literature.
It is the real imagination of the journey, the greatest danger for those who dare to leave their village.
It is the terrible moment when you are alone and helpless.
And yes: I also wanted to describe the cumulonimbus, to create my own “low over the Atlantic”, to tell the story of the airplane and the hurricane, after reading a lot from the impressive writer and pilot Romain Gary.
The desire to "know the sky"
In novels, the storm is of course the absolute opposite of true horror, because it is above all that which the reader who sits comfortably in his armchair is spared. When Roland Barthes quotes Jules Verne, this “shared happiness of finiteness”, this exploration of boundaries through the imagination of travel, this existential dream of childhood, he chooses the “almost perfect” novel “The Mysterious Island” as an example. This “child in the man (or woman)”, which the reader is because once again stories can be told, “reinvents the world, fills it in, encloses it, includes itself in it (...) while outside the storm, that is, the infinite, is raging senselessly ”.
But that is not all. I, who have always liked etymology, are pleased that the word meteorology comes from the ancient Greek μετέωρος (that which is above the air) and λογος (knowledge). So “know the sky” to predict what to expect tomorrow. Because man has always wanted to foresee, undoubtedly also in order to rule. And the weather is undoubtedly the first thing he wanted to foresee in order to sow and reap, also to wage war.
Of course, in order to anticipate, we have to learn from past experiences and deal with these facts. We are now using the ever greater possibilities of computer simulation. With the Destination Earth project, Europe is trying to create a virtual climate earth, a digital twin of the planet, in order to be able to depict the weather in ten years Recognize driven experiment. But meteorology is not climate.
If you make a fire under a pot and throw a cork in it, you don't know where the cork will be after a few seconds;
but it can be said that the water will boil in a minute.
Likewise, the future climate is predictable and derivable, and the fate that awaits our civilization is unfortunately inevitable.
But next month's weather will remain chaotic and random for a long time to come.
If, however, the admirals of Philip II of Spain had been equipped with our instruments, the squadrons of his armada would not have had to turn back and Spanish would certainly be spoken in London today as in New York.
The language in which we live owes a great deal to the clouds, the rain and the wind.
What literature owes to the weather
And literature, too, owes a lot to them. On April 5, 1815, the Tambora volcano erupted on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia. He spat huge clouds of dust into the air, and it was pitch black around him for days. In parts of North America and Europe, temperatures dropped more than ten degrees Celsius. Tolstoy describes in "War and Peace" a beautiful oat field on which a camp had been set up and which was mowed by the soldiers, obviously for the fodder. And the following year, another "year without a summer," future Mary Shelley stayed locked in the large villa Lord Byron had rented on the shores of Lake Geneva with her half-sister Claire Clairmont and her lover Percy Shelley, and one stormy July night shaped the history of literature:"We will all write a ghost story."
I fondly remember Frankenstein was born this way, in the eddies of a storm that wiped out the summer sun.
From the French by Romy and Jürgen Ritte.