Cold comfort

The gloppiest snow-slush storm of the year hit on Tuesday, putting people in a sour mood. The damp fronts slide toward us from the Great Lakes; after they’ve crossed into the ocean, the sky clears, and the temperatures drop quickly with no cloud cover—it was below zero last night just two counties to the north of us. It’s not South Dakota, but it keeps you on your toes.

I’m reading Némirovsky after being entranced like everyone else with Suite Française, and her earlier short works are marvelous. Despite her French upbringing, she’s still convincingly Russian about the thrill of an old servant raised in Siberia at the first blast of winter air and smothering snowstorms. By contrast, I recall being mocked as a hothouse plant during my Midwest youth, reluctant to venture out of doors even when swaddled from head to toe.

Now I find there’s nothing quite like it. My neighborhood in the heights north of the George Washington Bridge is a few degrees colder than the city, and on my streets two or three inches of the wet snow that dissipated in Midtown managed to accumulate onto car rooftops. GW himself spent some time running from the redcoats quartered in these woods, escaping from Cornwallis who crossed the river into New Jersey in hot pursuit right at the Palisades opposite Yonkers. How easily things could have turned out differently. If the bridge had been built anyway, we’d be calling it something else.

Némirovsky always signals what is happening weatherwise with her characters and gives us the temperature inside as well, a sense of the smoky lamps or the ice forming on the windows. Here in Manhattan we stumble through the winter streets, then bake in our sweat-lodge offices trapped with radiators that can’t be controlled or even running the A/C mid-winter since the windows are usually sealed shut.

Climate seems an unavoidable fact of life, and yet we’ve entered an historical period in which Mark Twain’s wisecrack—‘Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it’—no longer applies. Economist Jeremy Warner in The Independent
of London points out some curious similarities between the climate and the credit crises:

Both have their origins in the idea that it is perfectly acceptable to pump up the system with huge amounts of toxic material—in the case of the credit crunch, trillions of dollars of sub-prime lending, and with climate change millions of tons of carbon. The consumerism of the credit bubble has moreover fed the growth in emissions. Both were based on unsustainable assumptions.

I would add that just as success in controlling global warning requires some humility from the hyper-developed North, the accelerating global economic debacle clamors for a major take-down of the Titans of Finance. The W era was all about frogmarching the unwilling into our glorious century, and it’s not yet clear if the Obama change-agents have realized that those approaches aren’t going to work. They still seem awfully busy getting the usual suspects to gather for brandy by the drawing room fireplace while the masses continue to shiver in the snow below.

[P.S.] Némirovsky, a French Catholic of Russian Jewish origins, was pursued by the Nazis, eventually caught and deported to Auschwitz where she died immediately. The unfinished Suite Française was saved in tiny notes she wrote while on the run by her children, who were hidden throughout the war and miraculously survived.