University of Virginia Library

Robert Gillmore

The Land In Winter

CHARLESTOWN, N. H. —
Away, far away in space and time
from the unnatural sticky hedonism
of the Southern summer. For this is
written at home, on the eve of
winter.

A dry wind is blowing the first
snow from a pallid sky over earth
that is hard and cold and through
trees that are bare and brown.

Were the earth to die, one
thinks, it would first look like this.
It is nature, as Thoreau said,
reduced to its lowest terms.

I Love It

And I do so love it. For there
seems to be here an irresistible
natural simile.

The snow is falling faster, and it
is only a little whiter than the
church where, I imagine, a parson
glared and pointed a bony finger at
my forebears. And my ancestors
especially if they were Winslows —
glared back.

Today the church is a pretty
curiosity. There is nothing there
now to glare about. Our conflicts are
directed elsewhere.

I remember a precious
conversation with my grandfather
before he died.

The question was: Should
"some communists" speak at the
University of New Hampshire?

No, they should not, said my
grandfather.

Because they would poison the
political thought of youth?

No, not at all, said my
grandfather.

"If they want to come," he
said," they will pay for the heat
and lights and janitors and police
and all the other things it costs to
have them there."

All of which says so much about
a mind which I hesitate to call
anything like "New England" or
"Yankee" for I really do not know
how narrow — or wide-spread it is.

Economic

But, whatever its extent, it sees
man as both intelligent and evil
and, above all, as economic man. It
sees politics as a battle not for
one's mind, for one's wallet.

And it would explode the old
Frostian lie that men are more
together than apart. For men are
enemies.

Reminded Again

And so, we are reminded again
of the land in winter.

And of New England houses,
houses with square, classic
windows, windows without
shutters, without shades, so that
one can always see the land and
know it.

And houses where children are
nearly strangers to their parents,
where children, like young lions,
are taught to kill, where love is not
a gift but a prize — a prize for
showing that one is learning to kill
well.

The land, especially in winter,
and men, even those closest to us,
are all in their very nature and in
their own ways, our enemies.

The consolation, thankfully, is
our separateness — in aloofness,
which is a bad word for privacy,
of freedom.

We live alone in our own houses
or not at all.