La nieve, combustible filosófico

"My late father, who had something good to say about most things, used to console people who complained about bitter cold weather by reminding them of the joys of a hot bowl of soup and a strong drink being made permissible early in the day by extraordinary circumstances. In addition, he claimed that the cold concentrates the mind. The moment we step outdoors, we do what we have to do with uncommon intelligence and dispatch, unlike those folks who can afford to sit in the shade of a Mediterranean or Caribbean island. Once we lie down, time ceases to count and we can meditate on eternity, Cioran believed. History, he said, is the product of people who stand up and get busy (...). With deep winter upon us and the weather growing colder, even the wood smoke out of the neighbours chimneys could be described as philosophizing. I can see it move its lips as it rises, telling the indifferent sky about our loneliness, the torment of our minds and passions which we keep secret fom each other, and the wonder and pain of our mortality and our eventual vanishing form this earth, It´s a kind of deep, cathedral-like quiet that precedes a snowfall. One looks with amazement at the bare trees, the gray daylight making its slow retreat across the bare fields, and inevitably recalls Emily Dickinson poem, in which she speaks of just such a winter afternoon -windless and cold, when an otherworldly light falls and shadows hold their breath- and of the hurt that it gives us for which we can find no scar, only a closer peek inside ourselves where the meaning and all the unanswered questions are" (Fragmento de "Winter´s Philoshophers", Charles Simic, "The New York Review of Books")