The Metereological Sublime

Snow always delights. Why should it delight? The holiday season perhaps comes in part from the travails of rural life when the cold weather would force people indoors to eat the birds that wouldn’t survive the winter. They transformed hardship and suffering into delight. But snow continues to delight us in the cities.

Perhaps it’s a version of the sublime. Kant says the experience of a vast rolling ocean is both terrifying and pleasurable because first we feel our physical insignificance and then are reminded of our metaphysical freedom.

Snow delights by sublimely transforming the cityscape. We are reminded of the awesome power of nature. Even London, even one of the greatest, largest, most enduring cities of the world can be blanketed in snow. We can be interrupted, convulsed as a city. We change our lives for a time: we calculate journeys differently, each turn of the road reveals a landscape made unrecognisable, the light is suddenly strange. Our bodies, our very bodies are contorted as we plant our feet differently, feeling unfamiliar strains as our legs tense to stay upright.

But the city renders snow pleasurably sublime because snow, finally, can be incorporated into the city as decoration.