Ah, the Dartmouth winter. Sloughing through my third Hanover freeze, I find myself pondering a number of observations I've made over the years about this dreary season. Dartmouth doesn't just get cold for a few months; it crystallizes. Everything slows down. Caution guides our every move, be it within the realm of the physical, the intellectual, or the emotional.
Dartmouth looks a bit like Superman's Fortress of Solitude these days, only there's no green crystal to key me into a rockin' conversation with Marlon Brando (though President Freedman's open office hours have a similar psychological effect). The Green is a great sluice of ice, across which I, the oblivious and uncoordinated buffoon, may cascade and flounder at any one of a dozen random moments on my way to class. Breezes are like tiny frost-knives -- if there is even one little bit of exposed skin on my face, the wind will seize it in its claws and clutch it with bitter winter fury.
The key to Dartmouth cold weather gear is, of course, the hat, or the hood, whichever your preference may be -- I'm not here to preach. The most wonderful thing about winter headgear is its absolute obliteration of all peripheral vision. Makes crossing Main Street quite a gamble, unless you choose to swivel your whole upper body left-to-right like you're Darth Vader or Batman.
(I think that's quite enough superhero references for one column, don't you?)
The cold weather also seems to have the effect of stultifying, or at least significantly calming, Dartmouth's much-ballyhooed intellectual discourse. Instead of a flurry of new and exciting ideas playing off each other, we get similar, empty notions heaped on top of one another like diner hotcakes, lathered in the cheap syrup of meandering faux-intellectualism. (Now there was a labored metaphor, eh?) Classroom "discussion sections" start to feel like prison sentences; it seems roundtable repartee just ain't what it used to be. There you are, perched on a chair in one of Rocky's massive lecture halls, witnessing, let us imagine, a heated examination of the symbology of the Sun in Albert Camus' existential hash-heave "The Stranger."
Immediately after the discussion begins, one eager front-row notes-fiend shoots up his or her arm like it's just received a thousand volts of electricity: "I think that the symbolism of the sun is very important."
Now the discussion is catalyzed -- another would-be Catullus-translator tosses two cents into the fomenting intellectual whirlpool: "I found the sun to be quite avant-garde, rather pseudo-postmodern, almost jackhammer."
You can feel the neurotransmitters burning up a swath: "The sun is really the tragic figure of the novel -- we all must weep for the sun."
YES! $26,000 a year is paying huge intellectual dividends now: "Certainly in terms of proto-existential hermeneutics, the sun is an allegorical chimera, a deus ex machina, if you will, a harbinger, a canard, a doe, a deer, a female deer ..."
You get the point.
Sometimes the cold slows us down, a quiescent gray fog enveloping our anger, sadness, frustration. Emotions settle into a deep blue funk, a lame vacillation between depression and apathy. On the one hand you've lost all motivation to venture out into the frigid, weary night; on the other hand, you'll go stir crazy if you have to spend one more minute staring at the four walls of your Mid-Fayer dorm (or wherever it is you weird people call home.)
A friend calls or blitzes, "What're you up to tonight?"
"I don't know," you reply. "I may count the fibers in my carpet. I'm still only halfway through the collected works of Dostoevsky. Or I may just moan."
But I believe that this cold winter blanket offers us something more. It is, perhaps, a chance to broker new levels of intimacy with those about whom we most care. Late-night winter fireside conversations have been known to yield a kind of profundity that cannot be found in spring's goofy frolicking or autumn's rustic mountaineering. In winter we reflect upon the past, reveal long-hidden secrets, hold loved ones in the silent comfort of an afternoon respite.
Or maybe we don't. I'm sorry, but it's freezing outside and I'm pretty irritable, so you'll excuse me if I'm unable to expound further on the subtle blessings of a sub-Arctic climate and encroaching cabin fever. It's just too cold to be sentimental.
