Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

TRANSITIONS : September 12, 1999

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The snows of yesteryear

Vijay Nambisan

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? - Villon, c.1461

The older we grow, unhappily, the shorter the seasons become. This is, speaking metaphysically, the price we pay for our becoming wiser; or so we may kid ourselves. Mathematically, it's quite simply worked out. When you are ten, one year is ten per cent of your life. When you are forty, it's only 2.5 per cent. And when you are ten, there is less to remember and it's more easily etched.

How vividly I recall a cyclone off the Madras (as it then was) coast when I was seven or so. For five days the wind and rain lashed the land; for five days we had no school (what can now match the happiness that gave us?) And sat around the house wrapped in shawls drinking hot chocolate and playing card games. But the cyclone of only two years ago is hardly even a memory, except one cameo of driving down Beach Road through three feet of dirty water.

The seasons are no more than an aide-memoire, as are all calendars. Poets are notoriously absent-minded; perhaps that is why they had to describe the seasons so they could not be forgotten. As the unknown authors of the Ritusamhara, for example, did.

It's a long time since those classifications were made. We who live in cities have only two seasons, hot and wet; or, in Delhi and elsewhere in the hinterland, hot and cold. In rural India, an attentive observer without carbon monoxide in the lungs may still see all six seasons gently going by.

Where I live, at an altitude of about a kilometre, there are again only two seasons: wet and cold. In the wet, I get soaked, and all my books are attacked by fungus; in the cold, the temperature goes down to zero and all my books are attacked by fungus. No, I have no respect for the seasons. Neither, I suppose, do those presently on the Kashmir-Ladakh border, where also there are only two seasons: that in which you may "infiltrate", and that in which you may not.

Joanna Van Gruisen/Fotomedia

Another thing about growing older (and wiser) is that each succeeding season seems worse than the one which is past. And it's not only newspaper readers and political reporters who feel this. "Alas, Postumus, Postumus," wrote Horace, "the fleeting years are slipping by." A true Roman, he didn't attempt to do anything about it. But other poets have done their bit for immortality.

In the days of our innocence, poets would exclaim, "Moment, thou art beautiful. Stop!" It didn't work. With sophistication came the idea of reverse suggestion. "Moment, thou art beautiful! Keep toddling . . ." This time it was perversely obedient. But the whole business has given us half our great poetry, in any language, so it must be thought to have been worth it.

Time. Time holds all our strings. Many science fiction stories, have been written in which Terrans make Contact with extra-terrestrials and discover that death is a purely local disease. The aliens are not really immortal; but they do not know what we call natural death, they are only susceptible to accidents. Would such beings, I wonder, hold the passage of time in as much respect as we do? Surely the feelings which the seasons inspire in us are given especial poignancy by the knowledge that this spring, these rains, may be the last we see.

It is only a little child - or one who lives as a little child, like Blake - who can be seriously, consciously aware of the passing of the seasons. To us who are blasÆ or weary, they are a second cloak, woven by Nature, which brushes over the first which we have woven ourselves. To a child all is new and magical . . . what was the last time I watched a flower open?

When we are children most of us imprison caterpillars in glass jars and wait for the eternity it takes them to first enfold themselves and then work their small miracle within their cocoons. Many of us soon lose patience with the silly creatures. I think watching the seasons pass is something like that. What are we waiting for?

Metaphorically, we have, each of us, our cocoons and our small miracles. We would be much sillier creatures if we had no need of them; with all eternity to hang about in. An immortal has no need of art. The gods of old were only moved by music because they were moved by the tragedy of the mortal, fallible being they had created.

The seasons promise and bring change; and they occupy us because being mortal we have need of change. We change our locale at a particular season of the year, if we can afford to; we certainly vary it according to the seasons of the day. If we had all eternity to enjoy the earth in, would we be so anxious to pull up roots? Our small unavoidable transitions are a foredooming of our one great transition, a record of our very transience. The seasons come by again, and some believe we will too.

"Great God! this is an awful place," Scott wrote in his diary at the South Pole. "Awful" used to carry the sense, in Johnson's time, of awesome or awe-inspiring. When Scott used it, it was January 1912, winter in his native Britain; but the snows of home must have seemed cosy and tame in comparison with the raging blizzards of the Antarctic summer.

This is an awful place; this is an awful place; this is an awful place; this is an awful place . . . the bodies of Scott and his companions were not found until the next summer. Mallory's body has been found on Everest after seventy-five years. Memory is the one constant; even the snows retreat and yield up their victims. We ask with Villon, not where last year is, but where its snows are.