Winter US Edition

Five Windows on the Season

Adam Gopnik

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781770890459
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The 2011 CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik, whose subject is winter -- the season, the space, the cycle.

Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. Here we learn how a poem by William Cowper heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Gopnik's kaleidoscopic work ends in the present day, when he traverses the underground city in Montreal, pondering the future of Northern culture.

A stunningly beautiful meditation buoyed by Gopnik's trademark gentle wit, Winter is at once an enchanting homage to an idea of a season and a captivating journey through the modern imagination. This deluxe 50th anniversary edition includes full-colour images printed on two 8-page inserts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The books and articles listed in this bibliography are my sources for most of the information contained before — drawn from these diligent scholars who dig weird data from the hard ice of time, and then have them packed into soft snowballs by delinquent essayists. Those that I have used at particular length I have tried to shout out in the right, specific moment in this book, as well. Special thanks also to Ian Bostridge, who set me right on Schubert; to Jane Hirschfeld, who told me so much about the Japanese idea of winter; and to Leland de la Durantaye, who suggested and supplied the epigraph from Frye.

There are many other people to thank. For diligent fact-checking, thanks to Nathaniel Stein at The New Yorker, and to Daniel Aureliano Newman and Letitia Henville at Massey College. And thanks, too, to Assistant Editor Kelly Joseph and Editorial Assistant Meredith Dees at Anansi, who worked so hard, particularly on the photo research and acquiring permissions. And my gratitude as well to Sarah MacLachlan, overseeing at Anansi, and Bernie Lucht and Philip Coulter of the CBC’s still matchless Ideas series, and to my friend and lawyer, Michael Levine.

Let me praise at length three more: editor Janie Yoon of Anansi, who, with quiet wit and careful intelligence, helped me work and rework these chapters; it’s the first time we have gone to war together and I can only say I hope we find another occasion to put on our armour. Next, my research consultant David A. Smith, without whose matchless grasp of the resources of the New York Public Library I would never have been able to write this book at all; he found source after source with a persistence nearly magical — to name a problem was to be provided with a book, and to worry about an issue was to be given a reference. And Ariel C. Knutson, my invaluable assistant and apprentice, who prepared the bibliography below for publication — and who also collated passages, shared lunches, transcribed the living-room lectures, read texts, offered notes, kept my spirits up, shared Justin Bieber pictures with my daughter, and generally offered more aid and comfort to an over-committed and often frantic writer than anyone should ever have to. She has my deep (and frankly slightly awestruck) gratitude.

ONE: ROMANTIC WINTER

CANADIAN ART AND CULTURE

Adamson, Jeremy. Lawren S. Harris: Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes, 1906–1930. Art Gallery of Ontario, January 14–February 26, 1978. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978.

Barbeau, Marius. Cornelius Krieghoff: Pioneer Painter of North America. Toronto: Macmillan, 1934.

Cameron, Elspeth, ed. Canadian Culture: An Introductory Reader. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1997.

Catalogue of an Exhibition of Contemporary British Water Colours: Wood Engravings by Clare Leighton, A. R. E., Arctic Sketches by Lawren Harris and A. Y. Jackson, R. C. A., May 1931. Toronto: Gallery, 1931.

Cavell, Edward, and Dennis R. Reid. When Winter Was King: The Image of Winter in 19th Century Canada. Banff, AB: Altitude Publishing and Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, 1988.

Christensen, Lisa. A Hiker’s Guide to the Rocky Mountain Art of Lawren Harris. Calgary, AB: Fifth House, 2000.

Davis, Ann. The Logic of Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting, 1920–1940. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

Glickman, Susan. The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.

Harper, J. Russell. Cornelius Krieghoff: The Habitant Farm/La ferme. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1977.

. Krieghoff. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.

Harris, Lawren. In the Ward: His Urban Poetry and Paintings, edited by Gregory Brian Betts. Toronto: Exile Editions, 2007.

. Lawren Harris:...