Diligence in the Snow

Photo: Marcel Krueger

By Marcel Krueger:

I sit on my island, in winter, and the antigen test is negative. 

Winter in Ireland rarely means snow, but always wind and rain. From November on, storm after storm rolls in from the Atlantic, often making ferry crossings and fishing dangerous or near impossible, and howl around my house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. I was born in October, so autumn is my favourite season yet winter following is a close second. I always wallowed in the dark and the cold, as for some reason I do not seem to be afflicted by seasonal affective disorder; or maybe a reverse one: I don't like heat, or the summer.  I have no issue with maintaining a work rhythm in winter, and sometimes even feel I write better, with the fireplace lit and a glass of whiskey at hand admittedly, but it is the muggy heat of summer that drains all my focus, motivation and attention. And where for others it might be a time for a lake or park picnic with friends or to have a few cold ones by the beach, it makes me only want to lie in a dark room with air-conditioning until October arrives. 

For me, winter is never about the hope of light after the dark, never about the return of spring. It is always about the dark itself, and the chance of introspection it provides. In recent years I often think about what we humans do in face of adversity and hardship, and how the pandemic has brought to light how our greed and fear of change seem to make it impossible to react properly to these challenges, much more than I would have ever felt possible. As I write this, people in democracies everywhere in Europe are out protesting the need to adhere to science and proclaim that they live in a dictatorship, on a continent that has seen so much real oppression and totalitarianism in the last hundred years alone. 

South of Dundalk, in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, hangs one of my favourite winter paintings: “The Diligence in the Snow” (La diligence dans la neige) from 1860, created by French socialist and realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877). If you look at the upper half of the painting, there is only an empty landscape, the east of France - on occasion Courbet added “Montagnes du Jura” to the title - stretching out to the horizon in grey and white, under an equally grey and white sky, indifferent in its monotony. There are no houses, no smoke from chimneys rising into the sky, and the light portrayed here is the undefinable greyness of winter - it could be anytime from later morning to early evening.

The human chaos and drama is confined to the bottom of the painting, where a stagecoach struggles through high drifts of snow pulled by two oxen and two horses, the two oxen in front struggling with their necks down, one coachman riding atop one, slumped down and blowing on his hands with a whip held in the crook of his arm. Behind them one horse rises up in its bridles, the other, exhausted, has already sunken to the side. The coach itself, weighted down with large chunks of snow on its roof, seems to be in the moment of foundering, dangerously tilted to the right. Another human figure, the second driver perhaps, has fallen face down into the snow hurrying towards the horses, and a woman and a man behind him, the passengers, are already left behind the capsizing coach. The man reaches out an arm towards it as the woman, the last in this chain of unlucky ones, holds on to the arm of the man. There are four or five houses depicted close by, also almost sunken into the snow, but no help is coming: there is no smoke rising from their chimneys either, the windows dark.   

Gustave Courbet,'The Diligence in the Snow' © The National Gallery, London. Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

What I like about the painting most is its duality, and, after a fashion, hopelessness. One moment you're hurrying along in the warm cabin of the coach swaddled in blankets looking out at a beautiful scenery, the next moment everything secure and safe is brought crashing down around you and the beautiful scenery you thought only to exist for your merriment becomes something dangerous, something threatening to kill you. 

If you live in winter, regardless on what hemisphere, you know this. You are acutely aware of the fragility of human existence, of it's often sudden and violent end in dark and windswept places, and are reminded of that fact every year when the first storms of the seasons make ferry crossings impossible.

I don't wish for winter to end. 

If we manage to kill it, which seems a distinct possibility given our rising temperatures and our incapability to do anything against the climate catastrophe here in Europe, what will make us pause and take a breath? If there is only an eternal summer, will we not manically keep on drinking and eating and using up whatever is left while the rest of the world already burns and those we abandoned making their way to us to partake in our frantic feast before it all goes to hell? 

I think we all need to learn to adjust to winter, even its dark and hopelessness. I was actually happy when in February 2021 the tail end of Storm Darcy  brought with it snow and wind for all of Ireland. Not much snow, just enough to dust the cockle fleet in the harbour and the scrapyard on the quays, but the three days it lasted may have given me more joy and hope than anything humans gave me in the 12 months before that. 

In the midst of winter, I did not discover an eternal summer, to paraphrase Albert Camus, but instead the conviction that we can't carry on as we've done before. As strong as the urge is to re-emerge from the pandemic into a world where nothing has changed, this is wishful thinking. Doing as we've always done and rejecting science is what brought us here, to a time of rampant viruses emerging from burning rain forests and thawing permafrost, of floods and death and people fleeing a heating global south. Those of us in the midst of winter, in deep ice and snow and hiding from the storms howling outside, we need to preserve and protect these moments of stillness and contemplation. Otherwise we will just watch the coach founder and find ourselves in a hostile place, with no help coming. 

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Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.