Let It Snow

Wow. It's really fracking cold here. And it's not even Christmas yet! (Last year, we didn't get this kind of snowfall until February or so). At the same time, it's extremely beautiful (as long as no one and nothing gets hurt), as the snow tends to clarify the landscape and cast it into a kind of black-and-white, cinematic space. Not a bad trade-off, really. One of my favorite books as a child was Ezra Jack Keats' A Snowy Day , a gorgeous picture book about a young boy who delights in the rituals of the first snowfall, spends all day outside, and is crushed to discover that the snowball he's saved has melted overnight. I can't play today-- have to go teach Truffaut. Then again, the two activities are not entirely unrelated-- after all, it was Truffaut's mentor who once said "Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseperable part of their beauty." And later, in the same essay, describing the phenomenon of photography, but also aptly interpreting my walk in the Cineville snow, if we substitute the weather for the lens: "Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love."