(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
What do you do in difficult times? What do you do when grief creeps in and seems to overturn the whole load? When illness suddenly strikes the legs away under one? You overwinter. Allows his body to linger. Becomes less enterprising. Pulls the plug and finds his place inside the winter knowing that sooner or later spring and the sun will come again.
Englishwoman Katherine May has created something as bizarre as an essayistic self-help book. Lyrically, it is in the language, personal in the approach. The book opens with her husband's illness – an illness she first ignores and thinks is just a flu. As it turns out to be more serious and requires a hospitalization, May is shaken. The man is doing fine and getting back on his feet quickly, but it may be the event that makes it all fall over for May. Many years of stress, longing for work while also having to build a family and keep a house, eventually become too much for May. She goes down with the flag, as we say in Danish. With crying, desperation and panic as a result. And then it's that she discovers winterone and overwintering.
Life is put more on standby
Winter is May's metaphor, but it's not just a metaphor. Admittedly, it's a metaphor when May uses it in the sense of overwintering, which is the book's title. Overwintering sets in when we are affected by illness, grief or otherwise become marginalized in society. It could be a firing or a broken love affair that triggers the overwintering. With overwintering, we are no longer in the center of life, but are pushed out into the periphery.
If we vehemently oppose this push, it can cause great despair and frustration, but in May's essayistic writing we must try to embrace the push and allow life to be put on standby more than usual. We need to seize it as a break and an opportunity for reflection. We must accept that the Others and the World go on without us. We who overwinter, on the other hand, must take a step aside in life and find strength in doing so. It may sound tendentious, and if May had only used overwintering and winter metaphorically, it probably would have also ended like this, but something happens in the meeting between the concrete and the metaphorical in Wintering.
She goes down with the flag, as we say in Danish.
Winter is also something quite literal in the book. May sets out to explore the anatomy of winter and the human being in this particular season. With a fine progression – moving from the gentle change of October in the sky over the bitter cold of January and heavy darkness to the dawning light of March – she seeks out the Winter People. She talks to the Danish woman who experiences the daily dip in the icy sea as exactly what keeps the depression away. She talks to Finnish sauna enthusiasts, biologists and doctors. Gradually, May gathers both a cultural-historical and personal picture of winter as a season and as a phenomenon.
A longing for the soft life
Reading May's work was for me a memory of the winters of my life. The concrete winters as well as my metaphorical winters where I was emotionally down and had to heal. When I was fired as cultural editor at Jyllands-Posten a year and a half ago, the months that followed were without much activity. They were a matter of not allowing the dark thoughts to take over. To undertake simple chores in order to find oneself anew. It was an overwintering.
But I also remember concrete winters and the value that could be in embracing even the smallest activity and letting it stretch out in time. In particular, I remember one visit in the childhood book bus. Normally it would stay in the village I grew up in, but in the week I remember, the bus was only available in one of the neighboring villages. Therefore, I walked the half-long walk from my village to someone else's village to borrow a book or two and then hike home across the fields in the winter. In it the joy became greater. At least here in the blurred layer of memory.
We must accept that the Others and the World go on without us.
During the reading of May, however, I am also transported back to the present, because there is something quite exceptional about the time right now, which the book seems to reason. I'm talking about the comprehensive, of course corona-pandemic. May's book was written beforehand and is therefore at no time specifically about the pandemic time, but still you read corona into the work.
The whole world is overwintering in our time. We as humanity are set aside for a winter indefinitely. Therefore, May's book is also a book for and for the time being.
It is certainly unpopular to write the coming sentences, but I think for some there will be a longing for the very corona-time. I am aware that this is the perspective of the privileged and that millions of people will find for whom corona is equal to unemployment, illness and death, is equal to difficulties and frustration. But there is also a crowd of people for whom corona-Time is a fruitful winter, which we will miss. A longing for the soft life. A life where you can cut off all the superfluous and concentrate on a few, close things. Be with their loved ones. Read the books you had dreamed of for so long. Start a sourdough, cook and beef stock. Being confronted with oneself. And maybe take up residence in the accident for a while instead of always trying to get out of there as soon as possible.
It is almost banal and simple, but precisely in that we find the strength of wintering. Thanks to May for reminding us of that.
