You know how you feel when somebody tells you the same stupid joke for the fortieth time, and the weak smiles you used to muster up out of sheer politeness have given way to stone-faced impassivity, which only makes them tell you that same stupid joke for the forty-first time, only now they are digging you in the ribs with an elbow and shrieking, "Get it?!"
Well, that was how I felt when I looked out the window this morning and saw that it was snowing again.
My way of coping with the overabundance of snow has been to read a lot of novels, stories and poems that deal with snowfalls worse than what NYC has been coping with this winter. Of course, I could just go online and read the Minnesota newspapers - or, for that matter, Atlanta's - but I have ever been one who must interpret my personal reality through the lens of literature. So, on the umpteenth day that I found myself snowed in with a lot of good books as my only solace (the leftover Christmas candy having run out some time before) I turned to some of the following to remind myself that I'm not the only one it ever snowed on. So until this meteorological nonsense stops, I shall hold forth, in no particular order, on a couple of works by snowbound writers, some of whom were clearly clearly tapping their toes to mental strains of Old Blue Eyes as they tapped at their typewriter keys. (Sinatra link below. I must say, I could do without the Triscuits ad, but the images of buried cars and people with shovels and runny noses that accompany the jaunty melody are depressingly familiar.)
Jack London: The Call of the Wild and White Fang
Jack London evokes Man vs. Nature with brutal clarity and impeccable powers of description, only he does it from the point of view of Dog vs. Nature. I had only once before read The Call of the Wild, and it left a vague impression upon me that I didn't want to read it again. I read it again anyway, and then I remembered why I'd had trouble with it the first time around. White Fang is hard to take if you are a dog lover. The Call of the Wild is flat-out impossible. The abuse endured by the heroic dog Buck, kidnapped from his California home and viciously forced into a life of servitude as a sled dog in the Klondike Gold Rush, is vividly evoked, and the fact that he's left alive and ultimately fades into legend at the end of the book does nothing to mitigate the horrors he and the many, many, many dogs who die in its harrowing course suffer. My 1926 copy is perfectly beautiful, with gorgeously tinted illustrations of the kind they don't produce anymore, gold stamped titles on the spine and blind-stamped pine tree motifs on the front board, and I doubt I will ever open it again. How they decided this was a suitable book for children is beyond me. But then, some people think Der Struwwelpeter is a jolly little bedtime story, too.
White Fang has been a favorite of mine for many years. For one thing, there's a fairly happy ending: After years of misery and abuse at the hands of a fiendish owner who pits White Fang - 3/4 wolf and 1/4 dog - in death matches against any number of dogs, wolves, and wildcats in the melee of the Gold Rush Klondike, White Fang is saved from savagery and despair, tamed by the Love of a Good Man (I can identify with him right there) and retires to a life of cushy abundance in sunny California (and here, alas, my identification ends.)
In the book's opening chapters, a starving pack of wolves (one of them - the reddish female - will become White Fang's mother) relentlessly pursues two prospectors toiling across the frozen tundra to bring the body of a third back to civilization for decent burial, in the process losing all of the sled dogs and one of the prospectors to the ravening maws of the wolves (and thus anticipating the central macabre joke of As I Lay Dying by 24 years.) In the following passage, all but two of the sled dogs have been eaten, and so has the other prospector; the body they'd set out to transport has been lashed to the topmost limbs of a tree so that the wolves won't get it; and the sole surviving man is desperately trying to stay awake, encircled by a bonfire he dares not let die out, lest he become yet another Beggin' Strip to the rapacious predators.
As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his own body which he had never felt before. He watched his moving muscles and was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers. By the light of the fire he crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly, now one at a time, now all together, spreading them wide or making quick gripping movements. He studied the nail-formation, and prodded the finger-tips, now sharply, and again softly, gauging the while the nerve-sensations produced. It fascinated him, and he grew suddenly fond of this subtle flesh of his that worked so beautifully and smoothly and delicately. Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn expectantly about him, and like a blow the realization would strike him that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their hungry fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had often been sustenance to him.
He came out of a doze that was half nightmare, to see the red-hued she-wolf before him. She was not more than half a dozen feet away sitting in the snow and wistfully regarding him. The two dogs were whimpering and snarling at his feet, but she took no notice of them. She was looking at the man, and for some time he returned her look. There was nothing threatening about her. She looked at him merely with a great wistfulness, but he knew it to be the wistfulness of an equally great hunger. He was the food, and the sight of him excited in her the gustatory sensations. Her mouth opened, the saliva drooled forth, and she licked her chops with the pleasure of anticipation.
A spasm of fear went through him. He reached hastily for a brand to throw at her. But even as he reached, and before his fingers had closed on the missile, she sprang back into safety; and he knew that she was used to having things thrown at her. She had snarled as she sprang away, baring her white fangs to their roots, all her wistfulness vanishing, being replaced by a carnivorous malignity that made him shudder. He glanced at the hand that held the brand, noticing the cunning delicacy of the fingers that gripped it, how they adjusted themselves to all the inequalities of the surface, curling over and under and about the rough wood, and one little finger, too close to the burning portion of the brand, sensitively and automatically writhing back from the hurtful heat to a cooler gripping-place; and in the same instant he seemed to see a vision of those same sensitive and delicate fingers being crushed and torn by the white teeth of the she-wolf. Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now when his tenure of it was so precarious.
I defy any of you to read that passage without looking at your own hand and flexing your fingers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGRC2LYmHfU
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