A snow moment

For as long as I can remember snow has filled me with joy, even with happiness. However, there is not the one well-defined happiness-inducing snow moment – bright sunshine from a blue sky in a pristine white hilly landscape with a perfect long-distance track across it — in fact, snow can transform the same landscape and make it appear entirely different — and each appearance evokes a special mood.

When the first snow falls from low-hanging clouds in a dark sky and envelops the environment in a profound silence, a solemn and yet cheerful mood lays hold of me. Time and again I lift my eyes to the window and watch the flakes dancing and finally settling on hedges, on fences and fence posts, forming streaks of white on the black boughs of the leafless tress and covering the fields with a thin layer of powdered sugar that thickens gradually until it spreads over them like a white blanket. Soon white bonnets have formed on all raised surfaces and even the roads are covered in snow in which tyre tracks are imprinted. All noise — be it from voices or vehicles or construction — appears muffled or has faded into silence as if the world stood still in an extended moment of prayer and meditation.

In the final sentences of his story ‘The Dead’ James Joyce captured such a snow moment more than 100 years ago.

 

[,,,]

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

James Joyce (1914) ‘The Dead’, in Dubliners. Granada Publishing Limited, 1981, p. 160-201