Word: snows
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...they are merely prodigious leapers!") collide with the grim fantasies spawned by anxiety ("Perhaps there will be an earthquake and we won't have to take exams"). One sits at a chair and looks out the window. Cambridge does not even have the grace to be covered with snow. ("What if Harry Levin actually wrote the plays of Shakespeare?"). Sulphur-laden ice spreads like cancer over the Charles and Roast Beef Specials cost 60 cents ("If the Atlantic rose a few inches, Boston would be devastated and there wouldn't be any exams...
...snow. Not anywhere in New England, except for the stuff manufactured by desperate ski-area operators, at a cost exceeding that of fine carpeting. It is a clear, cold day in January, and the early morning light glows on the hills and mountains. Beautiful, but there is a wrongness to the look and feel of things. There is too much brown in the landscape, too much detail. Snow brings blues and purples, edits out corn stubble and fallen leaves, turns a landscape into a line drawing. Its severity is what this fine January light should be explicating...
...snow, bygod, since the four to five inches that fell in middle December. What we have had in Vermont and New Hampshire is a forlorn alternation of warm rain and iron cold. Since it is cold now, we go skating. Most of us are not very good at it. Some of the girls and women have had figure-skating lessons, and some men played hockey in school, but in well-behaved years the frozen lakes have three feet of snow on them, and so we are skiers, not skaters. I am conscious of resembling, as I skate, a bishop...
...there is no snow. Winter has forgotten its lines. On damp, gray days at the beginning of December we said to each other, "It's coming" and "Looks like we're in for it," pretending to be worried at the approach of the first northeaster of the season. The fact is that everyone welcomes the melodrama of a big snowstorm. It is not just the sounds of the town and the highway that are hushed. The raging of ego and the clank of ambition are stilled at least for a while...
...people disappear into their rooms; they close the window and pray, pray that some knowledge will join the carbon dioxide floating around the room; pray that maybe, just maybe, there'll be another "act of God"--a Blizzard of '80 if you will--and Harvard will shut down. The snow refuses to fall. They emerge at meal times, lingering over the lime sherbet, going back for more Sauerbraten, saying "yes" to the pureed squash. Anything to postpone...