Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

May’s memoir shows how people living in the industrialized West are growing increasingly disconnected from nature. This has a direct impact on how a person seeks to tame and eradicate its harshest season, winter. In both private and public spheres, humans use electric light to mitigate its darkness and central heating to numb ourselves against its cold. With these defenses, communities can almost ignore the changes in the natural world and attempt to soldier on in a summerlike fashion. However, this disconnect comes at a cost, as people fail to value how the darkness and cold of winter can provide space for much needed rest and introspection.

On a global level, the vast amounts of energy expended to fight the darkness and cold have contributed to the warming of the earth and the subsequent, dangerous banishment of winter. May’s memoir does not mention the melting of polar ice caps, but she marks winter’s increasing lack of bite in more local ways. For example, she notes a change in the style of winters in the three and a half decades between her childhood and her son’s. Although her native Southeast England was never a place of abundant snowfall, it snowed often enough for May’s village to become snowbound and for her to have a feeling of the transformation snow wreaks on landscape, mobility, and habits.