10/2/79. EIGHTEEN Seventy Nine, That Is.

Nope, it's not snowing here yet. It's a beautiful, breezy 70 degrees here today. I just thought I would post this old picture of my boys and their snowman after I learned that it's Wallace Stevens' birthday. One of the late poet's most famous poems is called The Snow Man and I think that this picture represents the poem perfectly.

There's Big Pup, on the left, taking a human perspective of snow: cold, miserable, unhappy, pessimistic, negative, etc. Little Pup, on the right, views the snow from nature's perspective: comfortable,beautiful, happy, optimistic, positive, etc. He is the snowman. He is nature regarding humanity as nothing while the "listener," the "human," regards nature as nothing. We are all nothing. And nothing is all.

Or something like that.

The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.