Right now the sun is shining, the sky is a dazzling deep blue, and the temperature has just reached ninety-one degrees. I’m sorry if it’s not the same where you are, but that’s the reassuring thing about weather. If you don’t like your climate you can change it, simply by moving a few hundred or a few thousand miles.
I am probably too sensitive to weather. Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy, just like the old John Denver song. A rainy day produces instant depression, and I find really cold weather intolerable. If this a neurosis, I have plenty of company. I have been reading a wonderfully eccentric book by Alexandra Harris called “Weatherland.” It's a history of English weather and how it has affected the lives and works of writers and artists over the centuries. England has more and more annoying weather than anywhere else, except perhaps Scotland, and we talk about it all the time. So this is a rich and promising subject.
Apparently there have been fashions in weather, and we can follow them in literature and art. The painter Constable made clouds trendy, where previous artists had largely ignored them. The romantic poets and writers adoreddarkness and storms, while the modernists were clear and bright. A 1730 poem by James Thompson called "The Seasons" created a craze for rainy weather.In Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, the story of a poet who lives for three hundred years, he experiences different weather every century. The ancient literature of the Anglo-Saxons seems to be obsessed with winter and bitter cold, which is scarcely surprising since central heating was still fifteen centuries in the future.
Our modern heating and cooling systems allow us to control the weather indoors. But it’s still meteorological anarchy outdoors, and most of us are affected by it in one way or another. It's all a matter of what we expect and think we deserve. We expect summers to be sunny and warm, and feel cheated when they are wet and chilly. We prepare for winter by plunging into seasonally activated depression (SAD), and feel quite aggrieved if it turns out mild and pleasant. Most visitors to the south of France, where we are hiding out now, are running away from dismal summer weather in northern Europe. When you are enjoying good weather you feel ever so slightly superior to those who are not, and can send them annoying text messages. But good weather is like good fortune: it comes and goes. It's a lovely day today but tomorrow a fierce thunderstorm may come roaring down from the mountains, or the wind may switch to the north and bring us a taste of Scandinavian cold.
So it is fascinating to read how the daily theaterof the weather has shaped our culture. Especially in its extreme forms,weather warns us what small and vulnerable creatures we are, and reminds us, if we needed reminding,that we are the playthings of whimsical gods. All great art depends on this sense of fate. We might like the idea of living in a sunny, mild, calm climate year round. But without the stimulation, frustration and maddening unpredictability of the weather we wouldhave no conversation, no cosmic melodrama, and perhaps no great art.
Copyright: David Bouchier
