SNOW IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING in the world. A snowflake is a cluster of crystals, like a diamond, but diamond is one of the hardest materials found on the planet. Hercules’s helmet, Kronos’s scythe and Prometheus’s chains were all hewn from diamond. A snowflake, by contrast, is extremely fragile.
There’s nothing more fragile or more beautiful than a snowflake. Like all creatures, it exists in multiple forms. And so, while the Wild West Show was touring the world and reaching the peak of its fame, and while the last of the Indian tribes, now decimated, were being herded into overcrowded reserves, Wilson Alwyn Bentley was growing up quietly in Jericho, Vermont. As a teenager he roamed the countryside, climbed the hills and moseyed about among the maples. He thinks he can read tree bark. As he listens to the buzzing of flies, he can hear talk. When winter comes, he spends all his time outside; as soon as he gets in from school, and has eaten a good slice of pie, he’s off trekking, like all Yankees in Vermont. But he never goes very far, he slashes along the paths that take him to the immensity of tiny things. His mother is a schoolteacher. She bought him an old microscope, and every day he takes it out of its pretty pyramid-base box. He sets it up, slides open the tray and places a glass-and-bone plate on the flat surface. Very delicately, the tweezers tear a scrap of snow from the window ledge. It’s there on the plate. Little Wilson bends over the lens, and he can see. Wilson, the farmer’s son, the yokel from Vermont, can see. The white stub slowly melts on its glass plate. Wilson looks as long as he can. He’s fifteen years old.
For five years, he observes everything nature offers him: pine-cone scales, acorns, leaves, seeds, pebbles, petals, feathers, everything. Wilson wants to see it all. He’s drawn to anything small, as if the world were more beautiful in that form, humbler, more delicate, but also more abundant, stranger, and also vaster, as if there were some kind of sorcery in the imperceptible, and as if another world, at once minuscule but in reality vast, mind-bogglingly enormous, were hidden there on a different scale. It makes Wilson feel giddy. No one snowflake is like another. To begin with, he thought he’d found a single design; but he was wrong. God has created as many designs as there are snowflakes. And so as not to lose this marvellous beauty, Wilson draws them. But the snowflakes disappear. Pfft! He never has time to finish his drawing. His own breath melts the flakes. It’s as if God wanted to preserve the secret of their infinite individuality.
When he’s around seventeen, his parents finally buy him a camera. He secures the camera to the microscope, and sets it up outside. The snowflakes fall on the plate, the weather is cold. Willie’s shaking hands turn the focusing wheel. Holding his breath, he presses the button, and Pop! the snowflake has been captured by the silver spangles. But the images remain blurred. From time to time he loses heart. “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?” God asks a recalcitrant Job; and Willie tells himself that God doesn’t want photography to penetrate matter, that its mystery will not allow itself to be pierced. For a year, he keeps trying, refuses to give up. And at last he succeeds in photographing a snowflake, the first that anyone has ever captured.
So he embarks on a tremendous pursuit, a pursuit that’s at once tiny and tremendous. He photographs hundreds of snowflakes. It’s a miracle. There are no two alike. And while Buffalo Bill goes from town to town, doffing his Stetson tens and hundreds of times over, in a rumble of applause, Wilson is discovering the infinite variety behind what he thought was the same. He is discovering that, if you hold your breath for a moment and hunker down in the heart of your impressions, things that at first glance appear identical or imperceptible, will, when seen from very close, as the wind whips and the cold bites, subsequently separate out, and become particular, distinct. And you no longer know whether anything you could call snow, or snowflakes, actually exists, because they’re all different, all equal but dissimilar, strangely singular.
Nature is a spectacle. Oh, of course it’s not the only one. There’s thought. And others too. And Wilson, the crackpot from Vermont, can suddenly see that life is all disparity, that whether it’s snowflakes or marks made by your ball on the wall in the yard, no two are the same. And now he starts to examine drops of water, steam, mist—all those tiny, unpredictable, imponderable phenomena. A drop of water is such an extraordinary thing, with its deceiving transparency, its curves, its bulge, its incredible reflections. Wilson is flabbergasted. He’s stunned by all these hidden riches. And he doesn’t understand why people don’t look more carefully, why people don’t examine pine cones more closely, or tree bark, and pebbles from the river. He’s fascinated by lightness. Disarmed by inconsistency. Enchanted by softness.
And while Americans become ever more frantic, and people rush to all four corners of the continent to grub around in the earth, foul up the cracks in its surface, start banks, show off their legs and come up against their desires like stone hurdles, Wilson remains quietly in Vermont, on his parents’ farm. Looking. This is all he does. And he takes hundreds of photographs of pine-cone scales, moss filaments, flower petals, snail shells, lichen; he’s interested in dwarf forms, in things that are diminutive, or stunted. But what amazes him the most, dumbfounds and mesmerizes him, are things that melt, or flow, or stream, or burn, or thaw, or fade, or hide, or disappear. The things he finds the most beautiful, the most enthralling, are things that you can’t look at for long, which don’t recur, which only happen once, just once—there, right in front of you—and which last no longer than an instant. And then vanish. This is what intrigues him. He wishes he didn’t have to miss any of them. He’d like to capture them all, to preserve something from them, an imprint, a trace, a memento.
Oh, Wilson Bentley must be a bit cracked. Yes, he’s quite possibly a bit cracked. He spends hours alone, lying on a trellis, between the imperceptible tinkle of snowflakes on a glass plate and some unheard cry deep inside him. And if he loves photographing scales, feathers and seeds, he has a real weakness for snow. For snow is both soft and cold, beautiful and terrifyingly imperious towards humans. It blankets everything. Snow lies there, motionless, tenacious, enveloping the world, dazzling and monotonous.
And what Wilson fears the most would be to miss a snowflake, a single snowflake, to fail to capture each of its dancing, airborne, celestial and almost immaterial particles. He has the impression, as he lies on his trellis in the yard behind the farm, that, with his tweezers, he can physically touch the suprasensible. No sooner has he bent over the tiny crystal, the one just fallen from the sky, the tiny fragment of meteor, than it vanishes. You have to act quickly. Very quickly. If you want to etch this unique existence onto your photographic plate, the imprint which will be its grave, or, in a sense, its tome, like a fleeting sensation that you want to fix, you have to be lying in wait, at the ready, alert, responsive. In the few photographs that I’ve seen of him, Wilson is in the snow, outside his farm, photographing a snowflake, and smiling.
Without his having intended it, his pictures became famous, and were known throughout the world. He published some magnificent photographs in the National Geographic under the heading: “The Magic Beauty of Snow and Dew”. He describes the master pieces of nature which carelessly deposits the shapes of trees, ferns, coral and lace on our bedroom windows.
It’s said that he played the clarinet and imitated the sound of birds, turkeys and frogs. This may be true. His imagination is indisputable, but people must have made some of it up. He photographed the smile of young girls, but not one of these photographs has survived. He noted down everything: the weather, the clothes he wore, the day’s news items, how many litres of milk his farm had sold, everything and nothing. For him, the smallest details had their importance. But the essential part of his life was concentrated in his eyes. Wilson existed entirely in his eyes, as if living consisted in seeing, looking, as if he were haunted by the visible world, as if he were desperately searching for something. But what? Nothing perhaps. Just the sense of time perishing, forms failing.
As he grew older, he attempted the impossible: he wanted to photograph the wind. But photography kills everything it captures, movement dies in its slide holders. Even cinema can’t do it. You can only film the effects of wind, not the wind itself. He tried. I’ve never seen his photographs of breeze and blizzards; and I have no wish to see them. I can imagine them. A little later on, he also photographed drops of dew. It’s said that he looked out for them in the morning on the legs of grasshoppers.
He was an inveterate storyteller, stuck Chinese lanterns on the ceiling, played croquet in the dining room and shared scraps of his whimsical, upbeat philosophy with children. He loved the cinema. A fan of Mary Pickford, he never missed a film of hers, and would play the organ during the interval. When he fell in love with a schoolteacher, Mina Seeley, he was apparently content just to scratch her initials on a windowpane with his finger. Which is not inconsiderable.
He sold his prints for five cents apiece, and then the patterns turned up replicated on extremely expensive jewellery in Tiffany’s. He never knew either wealth or fame. After his parents died, he lived alone in a small part of their house, while his brothers and sisters occupied the rest. One fine day, at the age of sixty-six, as he was out walking in the snow, ten kilometres away from home, the cold got to his bones; but he still wanted—absolutely—to see something, a beautiful ice stalactite hanging from a pine branch. A storm blew up. People called him. But he went on looking. He looked at the delicate, graceful shape of the piece of ice, its slender, fragile, sensitive stem, its vaporous fringe. He was carried home unconscious. It was Christmas Eve. On the day he was buried, it’s said that it snowed.