Notes on setting:
“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions” -JD Salinger
I’m hesitant to call myself a poet, although I write poetry quite a bit, so I suppose I am one. But anyway, I was just thinking about how the great thing about studying at a school where it gets awful cold in the winter is that you live inside a magic world of quiet and power.
To walk across a bleak landscape with a seemingly arctic wind blowing the snow in a sheet is to feel wrapped up in a great battle. I suppose it’s rather sublime. The battle of human survival against nature at her harshest. The battle of knowledge against a void. The battle of love and friendship and bliss against the same. It’s hard to stand at the edge of that snow blown field and not feel a certain magnificence.
Here I worry about the lack of that.
I’ve always said that I would not do so well in a school with warm weather close to the ocean. Strong sunshine that sparkles off the water and warms on your skin is not for dense academia. It’s for meandering thoughts and easy bliss. It’s for drifting, in the most pleasant way. It’s soft. It’s becoming enamoured with carnal desires and it’s lying on rooftops.
But I worry that this wet, moderate sort of climate will not bring out the deepest depths of thought either. To me, rain is indulging in warm blankets and naps and caloric, cheese-heavy meals. It lacks the sublimity that I do think added a sort of great-battle aspect to my undergraduate career and pushed me and inspired me. I hope I can find inspiration in a different sort of nature here, where there are no snow-capped mountains to pass at sunrise nor evergreens lining every path, reminding me that quiet persistence is not something to underestimate.
