Snow is Better in Art

By The Franklin Lakes Journal

Published: February 28, 2010

Thousands of Bergen County residents continue to carry on without power to their homes. In Franklin Lakes, the Ambulance Building was opened to residents who needed emergency shelter, and in Wyckoff the Public Library was made available to residents in distress. Some homes were not expected to get power restored till the beginning of the week. Accidents, detours, postponements, unending hours of shoveling, blowing, and plowing can take all the joy out of snow fast.

Perhaps snow is better in art. Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in The Snow from the 16th century Bruegel shows a snow-covered valley full of ponds, a river, snow covered houses, churches, people working, playing. It looks beautiful.

It looks beautiful in other photographs, paintings, poems, and stories throughout history. It does not look good when it brings down your power lines, clogs your roads, and turns your town into a frozen wasteland. Snow is so much better in art when it reflects a feeling or emotion.

The haunting image from James Joyce’s short story The Dead reflects a feeling shared by many residents in the area. The story ends with snow falling all over the island as the protaganist slips into sleep, “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”