"Precipitation outlook"—40-50 mm of rain from Thursday Afternoon to Friday Afternoon" As I write, it's still snowing quite heavily in this part of town. The snow that began in the early evening yesterday has since buried my garden bench. The truck that ploughs our driveway has just taken three quarters of an hour over the job, its wheels spinning crazily on the thick ice that lies under the fresh snow.
Saturday's and Sunday's forecasts are vague but pessimistic: "mixed precipitation" seems to sum it up.
It looks as though our German conversation in the west end is cancelled for today; I'm not venturing out and nor are several others. The start of the week was bright and sunny but bitter cold and the sidewalks / sideroads lethally slippery. I'm still trying to recover from my stupid 5 mile walk in these conditions (Monday) when the effort of keeping upright strained so many muscles that I couldn't sleep at night.
Staying indoors, though, is yet more debilitating.
Baudelaire knew how to describe such a malaise (and strangely enough, there's comfort in this):
En es-tu donc venue à ce point d'engourdissement que tu ne te plaises que dans ton mal? S'il en est ainsi, fuyons vers les pays qui sont les analogies de la Mort [...] installons-nous au pôle. Là le soleil ne frise qu'obliquement la terre, et les lentes alternatives de la lumière et de la nuit suppriment la variété et augmentent la monotonie, cette moitié du néant. Là, nous pourrons prendre de longs bains de ténèbres, cependant que, pour nous divertir, les aurores boréales nous enverront de temps en temps leurs gerbes roses, comme des reflets d'un feu d'artifice de l'Enfer!»
Enfin, mon âme fait explosion, et sagement elle me crie: «N'importe où! n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!»
(Anywhere out of the world, 1867)
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