The second littleservice of 2010 was a compline based service on the theme of snow and cold. It included Moomins, AA Gill’s reflections on isolation in the arctic and spine-tingling music. Here are some highlights…

“There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep — then they appear.”

A snowy Reflection

AA Gill travelled to the Arctic circle  to view Polar Bears in 2008, and these are extracts from his meditations on snow, cold, and polar bears…

Cold. We spend our lives getting out of it, away from it; our whole human history has been spent avoiding it, wrapping up against it, fighting and escaping it. Cold shoulders, cold stares; vengeance is cold, corpses are cold. As cold as rejection, as cold as infidelity, as cold as loneliness.  Who wants to be cold? Hot is good: hot bodies, hot dinners, hot sex and holidays. Hot or cold is no sort of choice, except for some, the contrary, chilly few for whom the very, very cold has a clear and harsh allure. The cold places of the world have a siren call; they give us goose pimples, those frozen lands, the keening of the north wind.  The thing about extreme cold is everything is fine until it’s not. You walk along and it’s okay, but lose a glove and you’ll lose your hand. There are a lot of suicides here in Svarlbad: the absence of light, the relentless weather.      Aerden the Norwegian mentions that he skied across Greenland. Even by Arctic endurance standards, that’s impressive: Greenland has four time zones. “What was it like?” We settle down for a saga. “It’s flat, it’s white. On the 17th day, a small bird came to my tent. I fed it. It flew away, and I went on.” That’s it? That, apparently, was it. -finally Gill sees the elusive bear –“Polar bears are the most solitary animals on Earth. These males are shunned by all living things, including their own kind. They seek no solace in company, no warmth in togetherness. Mary Shelley sent Frankenstein’s misbegotten monster to this distant vastness. This bear is the parable at the end of the world. Lord of the bleak, haunting, sighing silence, listening to the loneliness.”

Schubert composed his Winterreise lieder on the great poem cycle by Muller.   It’s a dramatic monologue by an increasingly aging unrequited lover as he wanders through a landscape of fire, snow and ice, where his tears scald and then freeze. He encounters various people and things along the way which form the subject of the successive songs. His journey through the cold, dark and barren winter landscape mirror the journey taken by his heart.  At the end of the cycle  he finds an old barefoot hurdy-gurdy man, winding away his tunes.

Moomintroll is either lonely, miserable, angry or scared in Trollvinter the fifth in the series of Tove Jansson’s Moomins books, published in 1957- the result of being forced to survive in a world to which he feels he does not belong.  While the rest of the Moomin family hibernates, Moomintroll finds himself awake and unable to get back to sleep.  He discovers a world unknown to him, where the sun does not rise and the ground is covered with cold, white, wet powder. His only companion from the “real world,” as he insists on calling summertime, is Little My. She embraces the world of winter with adventurous pragmatism: “borrowing” freely from the Moomin house in order to have more fun; a silver tray turns into a sled with Moomintroll’s sun tent attached for a sail.

Meanwhile, Moomintroll is stomping around, miserably remembering warm summer days and hating winter more and more every day. He even makes up songs about how much he hates this dark, cold season, and bellows them out at the top of his lungs, hoping to frighten winter away and draws endless pictures of the world in summer, in case he forgets what it looks like Moominland is suddenly a scary, dark, lonely place and the sun doesn’t shine. Strange creatures have taken residence in the once-familiar places. Something grumpy lives under the sink, The Lady Of  The Cold passes by endangering everyone’s lives and the Groke takes away every last trace of warmth by sitting on it.  However, Moomintroll learns valuable lessons about the circle of life, death, overcoming fear and loneliness by living in the moment: building fires, making ice horses and drinking hot coffee, and seeing that strange things can be beautiful. He finally realizes that sometimes it’s best “if things aren’t so easy”.