PARTISAN REVIEW
531
comfortably warm. Before I grew my moustache, my face was the
first part of my body to feel the cold.
He reached down and across the kitchen table and grabbed his
wife's arm just above the elbow and yanked her to her feet, shaking
her once, holding her elbow high in the air so that she seemed to
dangle from it. The flesh on her face stiffened and drew forward
protectively, her head pulled down close to her shoulders, her one
free hand clutching vainly at the hard, outside surface of his viselike
grip, and when he bellowed into her face, she began to sob. I'm
sorry,
I'm sorry,
I
don't know what else to do! she cried. Then he bellowed
a second time. Just be quiet! You are making us miserable over
nothing!
Nothing!
This seems to be how the winter works on me, and what fol–
lows immediately from that work: first,
I
lose my hold on my sense
of myself, then of my life as some kind of a continuing history. Then
of my wife, and finally, of my children. The progression goes on out
from there, until at last, by the time the first trickles of spring appear,
I
am like a vaguely discolored fluid, floating on the surface of a
stagnant sea.
The how and the what, then, are easy to say and understand.
The difficult question, the true question here, is
why.
It's difficult for me even to ask it, not to mention answering,
for every time, and as soon as, I do ask it, I know that I'm no longer
talking about the weather.
If
the answer in fact did have anything
to do with the weather, if it somehow were able to explain to me
the aggressive working of the winter upon my mind's hold on itself
and the world, if it were able to show me that, from November to
April, I was being ravished by nothing more than the incessant waves
of snow and cold - then it would be a simple matter to move to
another climate. I would merely move my chair closer to the fire.
But I don't do that. I keep my chair where it has always been.
On the north side of the house and as close to the door as possible.
Which confuses me, confuses me now, today, when winter has just
begun. In a month, of course, I won't be confused, at least not in
this particular way, because the question will have been lost and I
will have given up the search for it. In two months I
will
have for–
gotten that there ever existed such a question. I'll be unable even to
speak of it.
