Tuesday
Sewanee experienced its first snow of the year yesterday, taking me back to memories of Sewanee snowfalls in the 1950s. While the six-inch snowfall is quite a lot for us, I was sure it was dwarfed by the snowfalls of my childhood. I found myself asking, with the great medieval French poet François Villon, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”
In the semi-autobiographical movie Amarcord, Federico Fellini depicts snow from his childhood that has piled up so deep that the townspeople must make their way through a system of tunnels. Again, memory has deepened the drifts. Dylan Thomas’s memory works similarly in A Child’s Christmas in Wales. As he notes in the opening paragraph, “I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.” The prose poem proceeds from there:
It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.
We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows – eternal, ever since Wednesday…
“Eternal, ever since Wednesday”—that pretty much sums up the tension between mythical memory and reality.
Thomas recounts his memory to a small boy, who has his own memories of past snowfalls. Thomas, feeling pressured to compete, insists that his snow was more spectacular:
But here a small boy says: “It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”
“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.”
Thomas’s childhood snows expand to mythical proportions:
The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying “Excelsior.” We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay.
For Thomas, the past is mystical and holy—and that is how the recollection ends:
Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
I too, as I prepare to go to sleep tonight, will turn down the gas (yes, we have gas heat), crawl into bed, look out into the darkness, and fall asleep. Who knows where memory will take me then?