Ramblings in winter

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Ramblings in winter

Thursday, 13 December 2018 | Hiranmay Karlekar

It is not just the chill but the chilling future that must send down shivers

If autumn, pace Keats, is a season of “mist and mellow fruitfulness”, winter, some say, is one of discontent. One would perhaps not be presuming too much if one believes that they have purloined their description from either or both works of literature that are widely known. The Eng lit types must have taken it from the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare’s play Richard III, which contains the line, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious by the sun of York.” Of course, the reference was not to the Yorkshire weather, which is not celebrated for its sunshine, but the House of York, one of the dynasties fighting the House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses which wracked England from 1455 to 1485 (according to some historians 1487).

It does not take a great leap of imagination to realise that all that intermittent, but terrible, blood-letting was for England’s crown, which the Yorkists and the Lancastrians fought under the symbols of the white and rose respectively. At the end of it, the prize went to Henry Tudor, who became king under the name of Henry VII.

All this was a long time ago. But Shakespeare is an eternal literary eminence and the source perhaps of the majority of literary quotes in English that make the rounds even now. The one cited has had a second coming in the form of the title of Nobel Laureate (literature) John Steinbeck’s last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, published in 1961, which, I believe is the secondary source of the description. Though not a towering, perennial icon like Shakespeare, Steinbeck was a literary stalwart of his time known for novels like The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.

That, however, is another matter. An important reason why the description has come to stay is that winter brings, in some parts, bone-chilling cold that sends shivers down to the extremities even when one is swaddled in warm clothes. No wonder the Bard associated the season with rough weather and wrote in As You like It, “Under the greenwood tree/Who loves to lie with me, / And turn his merry note/ Unto the sweet bird's throat, /Come hither, come hither, come hither:/ Here shall he see/ No enemy/ But winter and rough weather.”

The perennially constipated who scan sentences and paragraphs for their most uncharitable interpretation, might claim that the stanza’s underlying idea is that winter and rough weather are our enemies. While one cannot rule that out, I would rather believe that this would be stretching matters a bit too far and what we are really witnessing is no more than yet another example of poetic hyperbole.

That this is so would become clear if one looks at the next stanza:

“Who doth ambition shun/ And loves to live i' the sun, / Seeking the food he eats, / And pleased with what he gets, / Come hither, come hither, come hither:/ Here shall he see/ No enemy/ But winter and rough weather.”

There is here no trace of anger and rancor that one associates with enmity. Instead one finds an invitation to an idyllic existence in the enchanted Forest of Arden, which, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, transforms every person who arrives, making him or her mellow and relaxed through contact with nature. In fact, the focus is on the charms of such a life and the reference to winter and rough weather as the only enemies one would have to face there, is purely incidental.

Life like the one in Arden, with its simplicity and relaxed pace, doubtless has its charms for many, particularly those long in city pent. Advance of civilisation, however, is constantly expanding the web of demands for essentials, comforts, luxuries and entertainment, arising from production for commerce. It is a web from which it is most difficult for the trapped to extract themselves, particularly in the current age with the growing incidence of psychic manipulation through advertising, the cutting edge of market economy and culture.

The web is increasingly drawing humankind into a pattern of existence that is as bland and pleasurable as it is artificial. Even now, people remain, as Desmond Morris has shown in The Naked Ape, members of a hunting tribe in their defining character orientation. This is the way they first emerged and survived on earth and this is the way in which they had lived for hundreds and thousands of years before urban civilisation began taking giant strides in time. Palliatives like creating social, economic, cultural and political groups that resemble tribes, have not helped much. A life in an unnatural and claustrophobic environment makes homo sapiens fractious and irritable, sometimes setting off sub-conscious accumulation of resentment in explosions of individual and mass violence.

The winter of our discontent, therefore, arises, at the societal plane, from discontent over our existence. The latter needs to be addressed seriously, which, unfortunately, does not seem to be happening.

(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)

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