on cold
The carillon bells in the clock tower are ringing out the notes of some soundtrack, from a movie I’ve seen but can’t name. Across the street from the clock tower is the English department building, which has a hyphenated name, and the building itself is like this, hyphenated: the elevator opens on both sides, each side demarcated by one of the names.
Even after a semester-long class here, I cannot find the bathroom in this building without a stumbling trial and error through the halls. Today I stay on the outside, walking towards a cafe downtown. Against the gray store of a covered bridge over the street, connecting two buildings, is a tree with bright red leaves. It is as arresting as it is stark: the last thing of color left.
Cold comes in fits and starts, then all at once. Last week some days were nice enough to sit out on the library plaza, where sunlight snagged on the granite and that flat, orderly plane twinkled. On Monday night temperatures dipped below freezing for the first time this semester. This is how we measure time now, by the rhythm of the weather, the rhythm of our books and papers and final projects. It’s so cold, I want to die, says my friend as we exit class. She blows rapidly on her fingers, wind ruffling her hair.
The cold slips into your hands, makes you wish you’d never been born. (Really: the notorious antinatalist philosopher David Benatar marshals as one argument against bringing new life into the world the “thermal discomfort” one spends so much time experiencing.)
No accident when we talk about someone being aloof, distant, we call them cold. There’s an isolation bred by this weather. Being too hot, as you were this summer, in London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, brings with it camaraderie, exhibitionism — God, I’m sweating through my shirt, you say at dinner, fanning yourself. The city of Paris puts out misting stations that look like showers by the train station near the catacombs. You exchange a smile, a laugh, with the people who duck their heads under, douse themselves before you.
Cold: huddle, draw inward, walk fast. Cold offers no lounging, no languorousness. At best, you turn into the bear on a Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime tea box, the bear who’s launched a thousand memes, you curl up with your tea in a plush bathrobe.
At worst, you turn irritable and brittle as a hanging icicle, ready to snap.
Of course, there are the penguins. 2005, the documentary March of the Penguins, you still recall that scene, the blizzard, penguins in tight formation to stay insulated and alive, shuffling around to vary who stood on the outside of the circle, a level of cooperation industrialized human societies forget at our peril.
We don’t live in the world of the penguins, but in Simmel’s metropolis, that blinding sensorium with its “swift and continuous shift of internal and external stimuli.” In Simmel’s telling, against this rapidfire hailstorm of things to grab our attention, we adopt a blasé attitude out of self-preservation; in a world where you will be shattered if you let everything touch you, you develop a hard shell to let almost nothing touch you. It’s a huddle, but a solitary one. “The metropolis places emphasis on striving for the most individual forms of personal existence.” Up here, in this stone tower, I can see the city spread out like a bedsheet. The only consistent sound is the HVAC whirring, two vents by a glowing red exit sign. That low wind punctuated occasionally by a floating voice: the automated announcer for the elevator. It will be easy to float from here like that voice.
It’s so cold outside. You and I walk a few feet apart, hands in our own pockets. Our breath turns white where it meets the air. When you leave the library, suddenly, I think about how you turned away. We don’t touch, not really. Is it because I’m too proud, and you’re too cold?
Postscript:
my advisor and I co-authored an op-ed in the SF Chronicle about abortion!
Image credits:
Lead image: Wind, Harold Anchel, 1935-43. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sleepytime bear: Amazon
Penguins: Fred Olivier/Nature Picture Library/Science Photo Library, accessed at Quanta Magazine