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The annual
CBC Massey Lectures are captured by the
publication of a book. In an earlier
article I confessed a preference for a
greater emphasis on current substantive
research and scholarship in these
lectures. This year's book, Winter,
goes in another direction. As I got
into Winter by Adam Gopnik
(Anansi 2011) I couldn’t help sense again
some loss of substantive learning of the
kind I had enjoyed in The
Ring of Democracy. Let me hasten to
add that there is learning to be had
between the covers of Winter.
Let me also note that this is a well
written well-crafted book. It’s just I
want to feel more than that I have passed
some time agreeably with well-read
company. Writers like Gopnik know how to
write and will no doubt be read by
many with admiration.
Along the way
through the book there are pensive
intimate moments with allusions to the
human condition and our quest to pour
meaning into a universe of millions of
uncaring stars. This is the notion that,
as I recall Northrup Frye putting it,
humans create cocoons of metaphors to
comfortably live in. Gopnik’s final
chapter sumarised his themes differently:
“things have names because acts have
authors.” At the end I
wondered what exactly I had read so
pleasantly. I wasn’t stimulated to
criticism as by Ignatieff and The
Rights Revolution or Somerville in The
Ethical Imagination. I didn’t sense
gaining special insights I hadn’t been
aware I needed as with Franklin in The
Real World of Technology. Yes, I
can resonate with Gopnik’s romances of
winter. I have fond memories of sledding
and skiing and watching snow fall and
watching fire flames flicker after short
days. I have heard the stories of the
gruelling polar expeditions before. I have
read Frye on metaphor and the great codes.
This Winter
book seemed clever but unsatisfying.
Somehow more substance and stimulation
should be expected from Massey Lectures.
And my concern goes beyond a preference
for research and science versus fiction.
In contrast, last year’s Player
One,
which turned the Massey Lectures into
installments of a novel, was thought
provoking on several levels. Although
fiction, the context was relevant – rising
oil prices, potential implications for
breakdown in social cohesion, how various
archetypical humans treat each other in a
shared crisis. Perhaps this
year’s Massey Lectures on Winter
did not satisfy because I spent my
first full January and early February in
Mexico with a climate where the winter was
like a southern Ontario summer. Snow and
rain are not part of the daily routine.
Walking for exercise is possible without
fear of slipping and breaking arms or
legs. There are birds to watch. Native
tropical birds are intriguing in
themselves but there are also birds
familiar to this visitor from southern
Ontario - migratory birds preparing to
return North as the seasons turn towards
spring. Winter is defined by where you
choose to spend it – if you have the
luxury of choice. Gopnik doesn’t do
justice to this new winter experience as
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