Exuberance: The Passion for Life (5 page)

Our response to the return of light is joy, and in that joy we recognize our beholdenness to the natural world. We believe in spring because we know we can, but we are experienced enough as a species not to take it entirely for granted. Joy recognizes these moments of uncertainty as certainly as it recognizes the glories of spring. “
There was only—spring itself,” wrote Willa Cather in
My Ántonia
, “the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive.… If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.” It comes in fits and starts, and we respond in kind. But we know it is spring.

Not only spring, but its passing into the long days of summer,
has been cause for exuberant festivals. May Day, still celebrated in many places, albeit in a dampened way, was once one of the most riotously joyful occasions of the rural year. Festive bonfires were lit on the hills and young men and women went “a-maying” and followed the sounds of horns into the woods to cut down branches; these they decorated with flowers and hung over the windows and doors of their homes. Hoops were covered with greens and ribbons and laced with flowers, and May carols were sung. Maypoles, symbols of fertility, were cut from trees and garnished with bits of ribbons and cloth, leaves, colored eggshells, and bright flowers; villagers plaited ribbons as they danced around the maypole, celebrating the renewal of nature. “
The earth/Puts forth new life again,” wrote Langston Hughes. “The wonder spreads.”

May Day ceremonies, and those enacted later on Midsummer Day, are rejoicings in the fullness of orchards and crops, days white with blossom and open to hope and possibility: “
With the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves,” wrote Scott Fitzgerald in
The Great Gatsby
, “I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” The seasons of nature become the seasons and convictions of man. We celebrate spring because the sun is back, May because the trees and plants are flush, and the finish of harvest because the corn and apples are picked, the livestock ready. As days shorten and darkness dominates, we turn to midwinter fires or Christmas festivities for warmth and an assurance of the continuity of life. The joyousness of Christmas has few equals, and most of its great carols are no less exuberant than the exultant hymns of Easter—“
the dark night wakes, the glory breaks,” rings out the carol, “And Christmas comes once more.”

From our dependence upon nature evolved senses and emotions able to respond to its danger, beauty, and opportunity. We are by our nature, by these adaptations, urgently connected to the natural world. “
When we try to pick out anything by itself,” observed John
Muir, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” The hitching is the critical thing. Exuberance, as we shall see, makes the hitching stronger and the exploration of the universe more likely: it fuels anticipation; overlooks or minimizes risks and hardships; intensifies the joy once the exploration is done; and sharply increases the desire to recapture the joy, which in turn encourages further forays into the unknown. Those most enthusiastic and energetic in their responses to nature tend to be those who most profit from it in pleasure. They are also those most likely to expand their minds to comprehend it. The physicist Richard Feynman was certainly one of these. “
The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination,” he said. “Stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star.” We are part of nature; we come from the stars and we reach out to apprehend them. We are stardust in spirit and in fact; and when we delight in this, we delight in this in ourselves.

This was certainly true for Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley, a New England farmer who pursued far smaller bits of sky, the infinitely various snow crystals, with a single-minded delight. He was as exuberant in his pursuit of them as they were in their numbers. Nature was to Bentley an unbroken source of joy.

It is a rare person who remains unmoved by a first snowfall. Snow is magic: it draws us in, jostles memory, and stirs desire. It enchants. For Snowflake Bentley, snow cast a lifelong spell. Like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, whose contemporary he was, Bentley was incapable of indifference to the world around him. When there was a winter storm and snow was flying, he was in the fields or hills; he could not stay indoors. His delight in snow made him an astute observer of it; it then made him an infectiously
enthusiastic guide. Exuberance gave him passion, stamina, and a lasting voice to speak out for small beauties.

Wilson Bentley was born on a Vermont farm in 1865, just as the Civil War was ending. He was captivated by the beauty of snow crystals even when very young, and managed to persuade his parents to buy him a camera and microscope. By the age of nineteen he had taken the first ever photomicrograph of a snow crystal. He was irretrievably smitten. “
Amazed and thrilled at their matchless loveliness,” Bentley wrote many years later, “the work soon became so all-absorbing that I have continued it with undiminished enthusiasm all these years. No words can convey the least idea of the intense enjoyment, the almost countless thrills, these winter studies have afforded me.” Unlike John Muir, who went from the exploration of the vast wilderness lands to the apprehension of self, Bentley went from study of the infinitesimal to contemplation of the grand: “
The deeper one enters into the study of Nature,” he believed, “the further one ventures into and along the by-paths that, like a mystic maze, thread Nature’s realm in every direction, the broader and grander becomes the vista opened up to the view.”

Bentley could not remember a time when he did not love the snow. Always, from the beginning, he said, “
it was the snowflakes that fascinated me most.” From the first snowfall to the last, he was supremely happy. Passionate about snowflakes, he devoted his life to their study and preservation. “
I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty,” he once said to an interviewer. “It seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated.” He was as stricken by their impermanence as struck by their beauty: “
When a snowflake melted,” he lamented, “that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.” One snowstorm brought him the most exquisite crystal he had seen to date, “
a wonderful little splinter of
ice, incredibly fragile,” but despite his care the crystal was broken while transferring it to a slide. Even after many years had passed he was to declare the loss of the snow crystal “a tragedy,” and only with effort would he be able to hold back his tears.

Bentley was insistent upon saving his “snow blossoms” for the rest of the world; he was possessed, he said, by a “
great desire to show people something of this wonderful loveliness, an ambition to become, in some measure, its preserver.” Just as Muir and Roosevelt could not feel as they did about the American wilderness and not do everything within their powers to save it, so too Bentley looked at snowflakes, loved them, and then did all he could do to preserve their beauty. Snow crystals existed for a reason, he was convinced: “
Perhaps they come to us not only to reveal the wonderous beauty of the minute in Creation but to teach us that all earthly beauty is transient and must soon fade away. But though the beauty of the snow is evanescent … it fades but to come again.” (Thoreau, who died only a few years before Bentley was born, also had a near-mystical response to snowflakes: “
How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated!” he wrote in his journal. “I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.” Nature, he reflected with hope, had “not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart?”)

Bentley’s calling was to preserve the snow crystals and, once they were preserved, to give their loveliness an exuberant voice. He did the former with a patience that is nearly impossible to imagine, painstakingly taking photographs of more than five thousand individual crystals during his lifetime. Winter after New England winter he stood in the freezing cold as the snows fell, capturing crystals midflight, transferring them to glass plates, and photographing them before they could melt. Later, when he published their delicate images in the journals of science, his exuberance danced across the pages.

Enthusiastic descriptions of the shapes and origins of snow crystals, which bubbled up irrepressibly in his writings, were utterly out of keeping with the more circumspect language of most scientists. Indeed, Bentley’s language would be stricken from any modern scientific journal; even a whiff of it would result in withering reviews and raised eyebrows from more measured colleagues. Strong emotion, more often than not, is at cross-purposes with accurate scientific description. Enthusiasm is meant to be kept on a tight rein and love itself on a short lead, although one could argue, as Cyril Connolly did, that
he who is
too
much a master of his passions is reason’s slave.

Bentley need not have worried about such enslavement. In one scientific paper, published in 1902,
Bentley used the words “beauty” or “beautiful” nearly forty times in nine pages. The paper was about the atmospheric conditions affecting the size and form of snow crystals, as well as the classification of crystals and their occurrence and distribution in relation to various drifts and types of clouds and temperatures. But Bentley also wrote about the loveliness of the snow crystals whose photographic images he had chosen to include in the paper. They were, he said,
“marvelously beautiful
objects of nature … 
the feast of
[their]
beauty
fills these pages.” Snow crystals Nos. 716 and 718, he proclaimed, were “very choice and
beautiful,”
and Nos. 722 and 723 were “charming patterns in snow architecture.” He went on, enraptured by what he described as the “gems from God’s own laboratory”: “No. 785 is
so rarely beautiful,”
he enthused, and No. 781 is
“wonderfully beautiful,”
while the
“great beauty
of No. 837 will appeal to all lovers of the beautiful.” Other crystals were
“exquisitely”
or
“exceptionally beautiful.”
The snowstorm of February 1902, he gushed, contributed “choice examples of snow crystal architecture, as souvenirs of the skill of the Divine Artist.”

Bentley was unable to contain himself, even when making scientific hypotheses. In one scientific paper, he started his speculations
about the growth of crystals in a straightforward way: “
I assume that the configurations of the exterior portions of the crystals surrounding the nucleus must depend largely upon the initial and subsequent movement, or the flights, downward, or horizontally, of the growing crystals within the clouds,” he wrote. The objectivity of his language, to this point, is indistinguishable from that of any other scientist writing in the same journal. He continued for a while in a dispassionate vein: “We must therefore make a careful study and analysis of the interior portions of crystals.… These interior details reveal more or less completely the preexisting forms that the crystals assumed during their youth in cloudland.”

But then Bentley’s joy in the beauty of snow crystals breaks through: “Was ever life history written in more dainty or fairy-like hieroglyphics?” he asked. “How charming the task of trying to decipher them.” It would be impossible, he concluded, to find the ultimate snowflake, though that would not keep him from ardent pursuit. “It is extremely improbable that anyone has as yet found, or, indeed, ever will find, the one preeminently beautiful and symmetrical snow crystal that nature has probably fashioned when in her most artistic mood.”

Duncan Blanchard, an atmospheric scientist who has written
the definitive biography of Snowflake Bentley, likens Bentley’s search for the “preeminently beautiful snow crystal” to
Sir Galahad’s for the Holy Grail. This quest, believes Blanchard, “sustained and nourished Bentley with undiminished enthusiasm until his dying day. This was exuberance at its best.”

Certainly, twenty-five years after writing about the “
preeminently beautiful” snow crystal, Snowflake Bentley was still enthralled. And still looking. Subsequent winters provided him a wealth of new crystal photographs, and forty of the new “snow gems,” he was sure, could be described as “wonderful” or “masterpieces.”

Individual crystals, he rhapsodized, had to be seen to be believed. “
The beautiful branching one that fell December 9, 1921, No. 399, is a masterpiece of crystal architecture,” he exclaimed with his usual zeal, and No. 4215 was “thrillingly beautiful.” He wished that all readers of the journal in which his latest photographs appeared “could see and enjoy the snowflake masterpieces of this winter.”

The images of the snow crystals reproduced in the article are indeed beautiful, and Bentley’s ebullient portrayals very much make one wish one could have been there during the snowstorms as he captured the crystals falling to earth. Who would not have wanted to be there during the 1927 snowflake season as described by Bentley, especially during the “
wonderfully brilliant closing” of one late February day recalled by him? On that date, he exclaimed, “the clouds for a while showered the earth with starry, fernlike gems such as thrill, amaze, and delight snowflake lovers.” His delight is contagious.

Bentley is famous for his declaration that no two snowflakes are alike. He and other scientists knew that the infinite varieties of temperature and humidity conditions act together in such a way as to idiosyncratically notch crystals on their downward flight; unless collected at very high altitude before its journey is done, each snow crystal will be unique. This is true even of crystals artificially created in laboratory snow tanks.
No two will be alike; each will carry the physical history of its individual travels. A single ice crystal contains some ten sextillion molecules; therefore, “
considering all the ways those molecules can be arranged,” argues one contemporary scientist, “the odds against any two completely identical snowflakes having fallen since the atmosphere formed some four billion years ago are enormous.” Another has stated that “
it could snow day and night until the sun dies before two snow crystals would be exactly, precisely alike.” This is a marvelous,
if unprovable, thought. Snowflake Bentley intuited such singularity and loved it.