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The Blue Lagoon is a geothermal spa located just outside Reykjavik.
You may have seen this photogenic lagoon on Instagram.
Our tickets got us there in May, but Iceland was the most wintery place Id ever been.
Not only in temperature although that, obviously but in all things.
Icelanders were comfortable with negative space.
They seemed to drink alcohol in great quantities but without aggression.
At a gift shop, I bought a candle that described itself as scented with rhubarb and longing.
Katherine May visits the Blue Lagoon in her bookWintering.
At home, she is irritable, tired, uncomfortable.
Her house grows dirty.
She cant drink alcohol or coffee because of her stomach.
She spends her time pickling marsh plants and wondering whether her colleagues at the university are gossiping about her.
Thus she visits Iceland.
And other Arctic-adjacent places, such as Norway.
In addition to wandering these nations, May writes about pregnancy, wolves, C.S.
Lewis, homeschooling, and Margaret Thatchers speaking voice.
Like meditation or free-range jogging,Winteringis both meandering and disciplined.
This book has to be the most accidentally fortuitous publishing event in recent history.
And now, having never left, winter is back.
The sky gets dark roughly five minutes after lunchtime.
COVID cases are spiking.
Theres Tove Jansson, whose novelThe True Deceiverdemonstrates how coziness can be a yarns width away from claustrophobia.
TheresEthan Frome, in which winter offers an explanation for all the title characters miseries.
Life has dwindled to a single
vague reverberating note.
In the dusk I hear the humming
of a moth I cannot see.
Whence is this oppression coming?
Im in all, and alls in me.
The symptom cluster included lethargy, compulsive eating of sugary and starchy snacks, and an inability to concentrate.
(Who among us …) A book calledSeasonal Affective Disorder for Dummieswas published in 2007.
Winter doesnt stop at damaging moods, either.
There is now researchsuggestingthat our cognition itself worsens during the season that winter shrinks our attention spans.
After the link between sunlight and rickets was established, children were urged outside as a preventive measure.
Sunlight was what got New Yorkers through a summer of COVID.
Outdoor dining, with its hasty construction and improvised charm, was the urban equivalent of a Victory garden.
Streets closed down to allow for biking, jogging, and strolling.
The parks and beaches were full (but distanced).
Stoops became picnic tables.
You could buy takeout margaritas!
We put our masked heads together, albeit not literally, and made the best of a nightmare.
As winter shoves us back indoors, even that sliver of solace evaporates.
I grew up in San Francisco, which doesnt have a winter.
San Franciscans didnt use seasonal metaphors when talking about mood.
The season was semi-fictional.
No need to knit, bake gingerbread men, hang fairy lights, or preserve quinces.
When I moved to New York, I was delighted to discover winter.
What I liked most about it was how it forced everyone to temporarily share the same reality.
(I am cold.
When is the train coming?
Shortly after I arrived, smartphones annihilated the communal properties of foul weather.
At the onset of COVID, this intervention was reversed.
We have all been inducted into a temporary cult of empathy.
But that is already curdling as we become further homebound.
Our exchanges with real humans have diminished.
We turn to the internet for simulated engagement, and it is a poor substitute.
We are sick of Zoom.
There is nothing to do and nothing to talk about.
She bakes cookies with her son and daydreams about tending a beehive.
She reads and watches birds and goes to bed early.
She reminds herself that survival is a practice, not an effortless flow state.
She is inarguably an enchanting noticer-of-things, with a mind that conjures peculiar and effective metaphors.
But most of all, saunas.
May dislikes saunas, which she finds too hot.
I only need a glass of water, May repeats, annoyed.
She is given water.
The sauna has a conceptual significance for Finns that it doesnt have for the rest of us.
Its not a post-gym digestif or a method of bathing but a ritual event.
When the sauna gets too hot, you dont complain.
To sauna with someone is to forge a bond in sweat.
The ability to thrive in a brutal environment.
The strength to outlast everyone else in a sauna.
The strength to outlast is a through-line.
Despite her illness, May is amazingly hardy.
She tramps across frozen mud, mentally overriding whatever her prescribed painkillers cant stifle.
I pictured her like one of those high-altitude pine trees that thrive in harsh soil and weather.
A being not just immune to inhospitable conditions but bolstered by them.
Not surprisingly, May spends a moment with the Sylvia Plath poem Wintering.
It is a tricky piece to reckon with: grammatically ambiguous and tonally uneasy.
The poems final line sounds a note of optimism:The bees are flying.
But Mays reading is less discomposed.
Except that Plath didnt.
The book is most effective as an act of world-building.
The world is wood-burning stoves, plump pillows, flasks, cardigans, hot cocoa, pajamas, cookies.Hunkering.
Hibernation of the soul.
Its a cozy blanket, but theres also something alarming in the absolute retreat of this approach.
The authors diagnosis isnt ultimately cancer but something less serious, and for that Im glad.
ButWinteringstill reads like a program of palliative care.
Coping with darkness is a skill, and everybody needs to do it.
I just have trouble finding the romance in that.
