Apologies to our friends in the antipodes — but it’s cold up here in the northlands, 19 degrees Fahrenheit where we are now, which is about -7 degrees Celsius, going down to 3F overnight. I can tell when the temperature sinks to 15, because that’s about the level at which, when you breathe through your nose, you can feel things getting solid inside there. In Jack London’s terrific story “To Build a Fire,” set in the Klondike, you learn that at about -30 or so, when you spit, you hear a crackle in the air, because it freezes before it hits the ground. But really, those of us who live where the snow is on the ground from December to the end of March learn a lot of things about cold weather. For example, we know that if the sun is shining and it’s 25 degrees, snow on your driveway will melt a little. We know that the colder it gets, the drier the snow on the ground will be, so that it’s like white dust you can shake off your clothes before you go inside. At about 15 degrees, unless there’s an ice crust on top of it, when you walk on the snow you will hear it crunch and squeak under your boots. We know that if the sun’s out and it’s 30 degrees and you’re doing work, you’re going to sweat. We know that ice is most slippery when it’s got a very thin film of water or water vapor on top of it. We know that the worst snow to drive in is when it comes in tiny icy grains and it piles up like sand — no traction at all then. But there is nothing like it when the crystals of the snow on the ground sparkle in the sun, and you can see, from grain to grain, a different color of the rainbow, all determined by your angle of view, so that if you move your head a little one way or the other, the colors on the grains will change too.
I’ve never met anybody who says he likes warm air blowing in his face, but a cool breeze is another thing. We read that after Adam and Eve ate the apple, they were ashamed of themselves, and tried to hide their nakedness with fig leaves, and that is why when God was walking “in the cool of the evening,” they hid themselves. I love the translation “the cool of the evening,” but what the Hebrew says, literally, is “the breeze of the evening,” using the same word, ruach, that otherwise can mean “spirit,” as when “the spirit of God was stirring upon the waters.” Milton portrays Paradise, before the Fall, as being warm at noon, “more warmth than Adam needs,” so that the original human couple retire from labor then, to enjoy some noontide repast and repose. But the night, when they rest, is “wholesome and cool and mild,” and that is when they retire to their bower, a kind of natural house or nook covered and walled with fragrant bushes and herbs and flowers, all alive of course. And when God — it is actually the Son, not the Father — comes to judge them on that fateful evening of the Fall, Milton says that
gentle airs due at their hour
To fan the earth now waked, and usher in
The evening cool, when he from wrath more cool
Came the mild Judge and Intercessor both
To sentence man.
That’s a good thing indeed. Anger is hot; malice may be cold; but clemency is mild and cool. Yet the Son does not give Adam and Eve a chilly reception. It’s really the other way around. Adam wants to give God the brush-off — he doesn’t want to appear, he doesn’t want to talk, and he doesn’t seem to want to stick around. His heart must be warmed again with love. I take it that it was, and Eve’s heart was also, but that was God’s initiative, not their own.
So I guess there’s an ambiguity in the words that border upon our Word of the Week: cold, cool, chill, chilly. Lately I’ve been reading Civil War accounts and reminiscences published in various issues of The Century Magazine, 1887-1890, which Debra got for me for Christmas; I collect them in bound volumes of six issues each, about 1000 large and well-stored pages per volume. When the flames of war surround you, how do you react, if you’re supposed to lead men to battle, and the situation turns out not to be as you planned or hoped? One Union general at the infamous “crater” in front of Petersburg, thirty feet deep and a hundred feet in diameter, a great hole in the ground opened up by Union landmines, went cold with intransigence, safely ensconced in a bomb-proof shelter. That was surely bad. But when Grant had the overpowering advantage in numbers before Richmond in 1864, he too was cold, sending wave after wave of men into the battle to die but in their relentless attack to wear away the Confederates. I don’t know that I approve of his elementary strategy there. But I do know that one day, when I was driving with my family on the highway in the winter, on our way to visit our folks in Pennsylvania, all of a sudden I saw, a quarter of a mile ahead of us, on a part of the highway that spanned a brook beneath, a dozen cars strewed on each side of the road, facing in all directions, with a police car there too, because the hollow of the road had turned into an ice rink. I used the gear shift to slow down a little well in advance, threw the car into neutral, and steered through the mess — and I was absolutely cool while doing it, clear-headed, steel-eyed, feeling nothing — I wasn’t shaken up until a minute later when the mess was behind us. That’s what I guess you want in an emergency. I don’t know if you can plan to be that way. I sure didn’t!
Our word cold comes from Anglo-Saxon cald: the same word as German kalt, as an adjective. There was also the noun ciele, pronounced CHEE-eh-luh, meaning cold, and that’s the ancestor of our word chill, also a noun. We built the verb chill from that adjective, and then added that wonderful and productive little suffix -y to get another adjective, chilly. How to explain to somebody who doesn’t speak English as a first language that there’s a difference between cold and chilly? You can know something cold, and that’s really good, but a cold reception is colder and less promising than a chilly reception. There’s something final and decisive about cold that isn’t necessarily so with chilly. You can catch a cold in English, and that’s not so big a deal, but when you get the chills you need to be seen to right away. In Old English, you could get cielewearte — chillwarts! Not a bad word, eh? In England, I think the term is gooseflesh, I guess because geese are excitable birds; in the 1800’s in America we find goosebumps, which you can see on your arms when you’re suddenly exposed to cold or even fear; but where I grew up, it was goosepimples. How about you, dear Readers?
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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Join us as a paid subscriber now during our Christmas Special Forever Rate.
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