As Winter Begins

19/11/25

When I crave for winter it is not the cold I crave for, but rather the warmth. The warmth of watching the rain run down the window, the warmth of the low golden light that fills the room, the warmth of my heavy coat and scarf. Stranger though, when I crave for summer, I crave for coldness. I crave for the ability to cool off, run shrieking into the sea. I long for a summer where salvation is sticky bottles warmed by the sun, and the lake we turn to when we can tan no more. I suppose they say we always want what we can't have, and I suppose I am just another example of that. Or perhaps I am longing for some sort of equilibrium. You cannot be warm and cold at the same time.

And as the days get colder and darker and the longing for winter wares off, I have been thinking about that line from The Waste Land: “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.” Isn't it that a sad way to live? To seek salvation only by turning away from what you have. Yet, I suppose I too have a tendency to “go south in the winter.” To long for summer in the coldest of times, wrap myself in a blanket and stand in the winter sun, just to dream of the warm rays of last year.

How many seasons shall pass in our lives? How many times shall I see the robin pecking at the frozen ground? What does the robin think as it pecks? Does it know that winter has come? That its picture is painted onto the Christmas cards inside the house? What does the robin know of being remembered? We all want to be remembered, and we can only dream of being immortalised, but it cannot be good to know that you are great. It seems that great people are often cruel. Although it may not be the greatness that causes it, cruel people are often cruel.

Perhaps the answer is to embrace the seasons as they come, to be who you are right now. If we turn away from what we have, we will only realise we have had it all when it’s too late. Maybe that’s the problem, or maybe we knew that all along. We will wish away season after season until we reach our last. As Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, “He who was living is now dead. We who were living are now dying with a little patience.”