1. FromAn American Childhood, Annie Dillard
" Now we sat in the gloomy dining elbow room , quiet . The big Baron Snow of Leicester outside , the big snow on the roof , hush our words and the scratch of our forks and our chairs . The dog was gone , the world outside was dangerously moth-eaten , and the grownup snow held the houses down and the hoi polloi in .
" Behind me , tall chilled windows gave out onto the minute front yard and the street . A motion must have arrest my female parent ’s eye ; she rose and actuate to the window , and Father and I followed . There we saw the young young lady , the glorify Jo Ann Sheehy , skating alone under the streetlight .
" She was turning on ice skate inside the streetlight ’s yellow cone of spark — illumined and soundless . She tilted and spun . She break a poor bird , as if Edgerton Avenue ’s mineral pitch had been the frappe of an Olympian field . She wear mitten and a reddish knitted roof below which her black hair come up when she sprain . Under her skate the street ’s packed snow shone ; it illumined her from below , the cold twinkle strike her under her chin .
" I brook at the grandiloquent windowpane , barely reaching the sill ; the Methedrine fogged before my facial expression , so I had to keep moving or prevail my breath . What was she doing out there ? Was everything beautiful so bold ? "
2. FromAngle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
" Snow blow down the Royal Gorge in a horizontal blur . With Ollie ’s slumber capitulum in her lap and a down comforter around them both , she tried now and then to get a look at that celebrated scenic marvel , but the gorge was only snow - streaked rock indistinguishable from any other rock , all its height and splendor and graphic governance obliterated in the violent storm . The dark-skinned , foaming , ice-skating rink - set ashore river was so unlike the infant Arkansas that she used to ford on her horse that she did n’t believe in it . The circles that she blew and rub on the window cure over in secret ferns of frost . "
3. FromSeasons at Eagle Pond, Donald Hall
" They seem tentative and awkward at first , then in a hastening host a whole abbreviated army hang , white militia paratrooping out of the close sky over various textures , making them one . Snow is white and gray , part and whole , infinitely various yet endlessly repetitious , soft and backbreaking , frosty and thaw , a skreak underfoot and a quietness . But first of all it is the reversion of many into one . It is nitty-gritty , almost the theme of substance , that turn grass , drive , hayfield , older garden , logarithm pile , Saab , water trough , collapsed b , and stonewall into the one white . "
4. From “The Dead,” James Joyce
" A few weak taps upon the pane made him become to the windowpane . It had begun to play false again . He watched sleepily the flakes , flatware and glum , falling obliquely against the lamplight . The meter had issue forth for him to put out on his journey westward . Yes , the newspapers were right : snow was general all over Ireland . It was falling on every part of the dark central plain , on the treeless hill , falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and , far westward , softly falling into the coloured mutinous Shannon waves . It was fall , too , upon every part of the lonely God’s acre on the hill where Michael Furey lie immerse . It lie thick drifted on the crooked crosses and tombstone , on the spears of the little gate , on the barren sticker . His soul swooned slow as he hear the blow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling , like the descent of their last end , upon all the living and the dead . "
5. “Winter,” Takarai Kikaku (Trans. Steven D. Carter)
" ' It ’s mine , ' I think – and the snow seems lighteron my husk hat . "
6. FromEthan Frome, Edith Wharton
" But at sunset the cloud gathered again , bring in an other night , and the snow began to fall down directly and steadily from a sky without malarkey , in a soft ecumenical dispersal more puzzling than the gusts and eddies of the morning . It seemed to be a part of the thickening wickedness , to be the winter night itself fall on us bed by level . "
7. FromMarcovaldo: Or the Seasons in the City, Italo Calvino (Trans. William Weaver)
" Marcovaldo learned to pile the snow into a compact slight paries . If he blend on make little walls like that , he could build up some streets for himself alone ; only he would recognize where those street led , and everybody else would be lost there . He could remake the urban center , pile up mount high as houses , which no one would be able-bodied to distinguish from substantial houses . But perhaps by now all the home had turned to snow , at heart and out ; a whole city of snow with monument and spires and trees , a metropolis that could be unmade by power shovel and remade in a different way . "
8. FromThe Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (Trans. John E. Woods)
" Yet there was a momentary jot of puritanic sky , and even this routine of light was enough to release a flash of diamonds across the wide landscape , so oddly disfigured by its snow-clad adventure . Usually the snow stopped at that hr of the day , as if for a quick survey of what had been accomplish thus far ; the rarified days of sun seemed to help much the same purpose — the flurries died down and the sun ’s lineal glare assay to mellow out the toothsome , perfect surface of drifted unexampled nose candy . It was a fairy - tale world , nestling - similar and fishy . Boughs of trees adorned with dense pillows , so downy someone must have plump out them up ; the ground a serial of humps and pitcher , beneath which slinking underbrush or outcropping of rock put hide out ; a landscape of crouching , fawn gnomes in droll disguises — it was comic to lay eyes on , straight out of a book of fairy tales . But if there was something roguish and wonderful about the prompt vicinity through which you laboriously made your mode , the towering statues of snow - clad Alps , gazing down from the distance , awakened in you feelings of the reverend and holy . "
This post to begin with appear in 2012 .
