V

THE SNOW of the great storm still lies upon the landscape, the striations and erosions of its flattened surface still testifying to both the strength and the direction of the gale. Higher and higher across the south, the brilliant sun of March climbs to a noonday which is now clear of the higher branches of our dooryard trees, and from the kitchen chimney of the farm a faint pillar of blue, almost imperceptible smoke dissolves into the air. The wind is due west, cold as it blows across the snow, and the temperature is a little above freezing. Looking towards the sunlight and over the crust of purest white, I notice the chimney smoke at the next farm suddenly thicken and grow heavier: someone in the kitchen has just put a fresh stick on the fire.

It is a day to be busy out of doors and to come in only to warm one’s hands. A real sense of life is in the shining air, the earth stirs in its winter sleep, and the great solar energy by which we live is striking down with power into this iron-hard crust of earth and snow.

What has today taken my interest are the colors in our winter world. There is color seen and unseen everywhere about: the universe is no duality of white and blue, and were I to stop and stare about awhile, I know that I should see more than I now see in a casual glimpse. In the landscape near at hand both grey trees and brown together with white birches rise above the snow; between me and the sun are faraway stone walls whose shadows are almost black; to the west, the pines stand dark, and withered and rusty autumn is still discoverable along the borders of the fields. At a turn of the farm road, moreover, I know there stands a copse of brush which during the deep of winter has turned itself into a thicket of red twigs whose color becomes a strange coral after a night of ice and freezing rain.

Surely the most beautiful of all colors of winter is the blue of winter shadows on the snow! It is a blue which varies with the day and the light, but whatever its tone, is both tender and delicate, and to see it is to be reminded of the purity of certain blues in flowers.

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About an hour ago, I had a small adventure in this mystery of blue. A stone’s throw from our gate, the farm road climbs a rather steep twenty-foot rise, and one coming from the south sees the gate and the top of the knoll against the northern sky. I had been down to visit my neighbors, Carroll and Louise, and as I walked home up the knoll I saw by the gate the shadows of our white birches on the snow, an open pool of snow water in the road, and the northern sky above and beyond. For a moment, as I plodded ahead, this was all I really saw.

Then, even as I looked, something touched me on the shoulder with a new awareness, and the scene became transformed. The shadows which were but shadows turned to pools of a deep gentian blue, a color tranquil and serene, and the water, which had been but water in a snow pool close beside the shadows, became a mirror of some blue and glowing vault of heaven—this other blue being as pure as the first, but perhaps more bright, and with the brightness a measure more delicate. By contrast the sky beyond both the pool and the winter shadows appeared more green. The sun shone, there was no sound, and there was I standing in the road and staring at two of the most beautiful appearances of color in Nature which I think I have ever seen. Only a ridge of purest white snow separated the shadows from the pool.

It was as if Nature, in the depth of our austere winter, had called into being the delicate colors of a garden. I shall long remember this small adventure by the gate.

FARM DIARY

The northeast gale which recently swept the coast, arriving with the dark of Sunday evening and blowing great guns all the long hours of the night, did more damage than we had at first suspected. Trees were wrenched and broken, windows blown in, and I hear of barns having been partially unroofed. Our own small neighborhood did not fare badly, and I am glad to be able to set down that the entire crew was rescued from the freighter ashore on Cape Elizabeth. / The sun and the clock of life will presently be stirring the hibernating animals in their secret hideaways contrived within this earth, each small, faint heartbeat beginning to quicken in response to the new unseen splendor overhead. / Starlight on the fields of snow and all the windless sky a miracle of stars, and as Elizabeth and I walk out to see the rising of Arcturus, we hear a first owl hooting from the woods: “object, matrimony.” / Wood and coal holding out unusually well but I am glad that the living year is coming our way. / A quiet, warmish, cloudy morning with a smell of woodsmoke in the air from a neighbor’s brush-pile burning furiously above the snow.

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One aspect of the machine world which has not had sufficient attention is the relation of the machine age to the mystery of human joy. If there is one thing clear about the centuries dominated by the factory and the wheel, it is that although the machine can make everything from a spoon to a landing-craft, a natural joy in earthly living is something it never has and never will be able to manufacture. It has given us conveniences (often most uncomfortable) and comforts (often most inconvenient) but human happiness was never on its tray of wares. The historical result of the era has been an economic world so glutted with machine power that it is being shaken apart like a jerry-built factory, and a frustrate human world full of neurotic and ugly substitutes for joy.

Part of the confused violence of our time represents, I think, the unconscious search of man for his own natural happiness. He cannot live by bread alone and particularly not by sawdust bread. To speak in paradox, a sense of some joy in living is one of the most serious things in all the world.