A little while back, Saff made an observation about how the snow seems to be disappearing from the cities. He mused that they must have become too big and busy for significant snowfalls. I was inspired by the vein of wonder in what he was saying: the implication that the snow-free condition may have more behind it than a simple environmental equation of car exhaust, snow plows, and residential gas-burning heaters.
What Saff got me thinking about was whether this might be an affliction of the soul of the city as well, rather than just an environmental affliction of it's body. If the idea that a city could have a soul seems alien to you, seek out Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In it a phenomenally gifted Italian author of whimsy muses about the personalities of cities in the guise of conversations between Marco Polo and the Emperor Kublah Kahn. The near-personifications of the cities are so smooth and vivid that I used them as lullabies for a time. Or you could seek out the Sandman volume Worlds' End (Saff could better tell you which specific issue of the comic), wherein Neil Gaiman explores the dreams of cities and the consequences of them ever waking.
Both authors lend a personality--a soul--to cities that is greater than the sum of their streets and inhabitants. And when we talk about the fact that cities are no longer getting snow in the way they once did, I wonder if it's not an affliction of these synergetic souls. It's something about the cities' peoples being so constantly busy and in such a hurry. It whips up the air in a way, a metaphysical exothermic buildup of shit that needs to get done. The hardships and worries of all these people crammed into such a small area spill over into the cities' slumbering minds, and the anxiety burns in them like a fever. And, even though the citizens are rushing here and there all day long, they pass one another as silent ships, their only communications the binary strings of cell towers that glow red in the night from all the traffic flowing through them.
Perhaps the cities have grown and developped into a thing that is the antithesis of snow.
Snow: that natural element, meant to sanitize, slow, and insulate. Now it will only linger for any reasonable amount of time outside the cities, where the lives of people proceed at a pastoral pace slow enough to allow the snow to stay.
And if this is more than just urban warming? As the souls of the world's great cities fall sick with this fever of progress, burning across the skin of their concrete and ashphalt, they are the lymph nodes of the greater world, and through them the fevrile infection spreads to the world itself. Global warming, not as a consequence of carbon but as a spiritual affliction that we've inflicted on our world through the fervrent speed at which we've come to conduct our lives.
Could the snow be just a sympthom: an early harbinger of a more malignant sickness gone unseen?
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