We had our first snowstorm here a few days ago. Unseasonably early. A good portent. There is nothing quite as beautiful as the snow, whether first-falling or on a clear night following. During the storm, everything distant is subsumed in a white haze. All sound is muffled; a dead quiet and a dead loneliness. And at night, when the snow has settled on the pines, and on the gables of homes, it reflects the moonlight and the starlight, and the lights that man makes. A snowy night is never dark, even in the wilderness. The noisy black forest of summer becomes a silent place of silver light and steely-blue shadows. Beautiful, peaceful, and hostile. One feels alone, and painfully aware that without your coat, without a warm home awaiting you at the end of the road, you would be dead in the space of hours. Because the winter is death. Tolkien did not like it:

…and stones crack in the winter night,

when pools are black and trees are bare,

’tis evil in the wild to fare.

He intentionally starts the quest of the Ring in the dead of winter and ends it in spring. In his cosmogony, “immoderate colds” are a corruption wrought by the Satan-figure Melkor. Joyce uses the snow as a symbol of death, of forgetting and numb oblivion. They are not entirely wrong. But the time has come to be reconciled in our hearts with Old Man Winter. He does not love us, nor will he ever. But he has made us strong.

Tropical man has no thought but for today. Northern man must look through winter to spring, through death to rebirth. Our northern race was not forged in fire alone, but in ice. For Jack Frost is a moralist. Children haphazardly begotten out of wedlock, he will take. The isolated man, the consummate individual ‘lonely and desolate as the wild ass’ he will smite mercilessly. The family that does not save of their harvest, that fights itself and does not cooperate, he will ruin. The fool who cannot plan ahead he will starve. Only the hearth and the store-room keep him at bay. Only stone laid with assiduous care to stone will keep his bitter breath from your home.

I said he has no love for us, but that’s not exactly right. His love for us is harsh and merciless. Only through staving him off have we evolved. From whence industry? From wool, and from coal! The steam-engine, to mine coal, and the factory to spin wool. All of our strivings have their root in this: to preserve ourselves from winter, warm and safe around the hearth-fire. For we meet Death in late October each year, and though we cannot defeat him in the last, through our children we gain a small measure of eternity.

It’s no coincidence that winter is when we, as Europeans celebrate our holidays of family, from Thanksgiving through the birth of Christ. It is a time of contemplation and rest, for the making of art and planning the year ahead.

When the cold really starts to bite deep, and trees freeze to the sap, tropical humans and sand people vacate the public eye. They only go around out of necessity, heads bowed, subdued and reserved compared to their summertime exuberance. For they are under the hand of brutal Death, an inevitable death that leaves them feeling naked and insignificant. Hardly will you ever see them playing at snowball fights, or building snowmen, or sledding. For the cold reminds them of what they do not have, and it reminds us of what we do.

We know that the sun is entering a period of inactivity, and that this solar minimum will bring deeper and colder winters on the Earth. I want to believe reports of a coming ice age, but that seems overexaggerated. Nonetheless I welcome the coming frosts. They stand as a harbinger for the cleansing of our people and our lands.

Of course, what is the cold void of outer space but the greatest winter of them all? I fear and envy the humanity that evolves under its merciless hand.

Of old, a certain tradition was practiced in the North. When an aged man became weak, and his continued life began to burden his family, who cared for him, he would go out “hunting” in the woods in the dead of winter, never to be seen again.

“O King Winter, long have I defied you to see my children grow healthy and strong! But you have won, and so I come home to thee, at last, at last!“