A Mind of Winter
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
, Harmonium (1923)
The final line of this poem has puzzled and arrested readers for over a century. “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Stevens places two kinds of nothing side by side: the absence of what we project onto the world, and the presence of emptiness itself. To behold the second, one must first relinquish the first.
What strikes me is the prerequisite Stevens lays down. “One must have a mind of winter.” One must “have been cold a long time.” The perception he describes isn’t casual or instantaneous. It requires prolonged, bodily exposure. You don’t arrive at this kind of seeing by deciding to have it. You arrive by staying in the cold until the cold becomes your own temperature, until the boundary between you and the landscape thins to nothing.
There is a difference between looking and beholding. We can look at anything quickly, can summarize, paraphrase, extract the gist. But beholding, as Stevens renders it, requires the listener to become “nothing himself.” Not nobody, but nothing: stripped of the interpretive habits that usually stand between perception and the perceived. The wind is not sad. The bare place is not lonely. They simply are what they are, and what they are includes a particular kind of emptiness that can only be encountered, never described from the outside.
Attention of this kind is slow and unglamorous. It produces nothing immediately useful and might look, from a distance, like doing nothing at all. Yet Stevens suggests it is the precondition for encountering reality rather than our projections of it. When so much of our creative landscape is built from fluent surfaces, from pattern and plausibility, there is something radical about the listener who stays in the cold long enough to perceive what is actually present, including the nothing.