GIGANTIC CINEMA

A literary compendium of atmospheric readings.

Poets Keegan and Oswald gather a capacious selection of writings about weather, broadly defined: rain and snow, to be sure, but also “patterns and forces, things that are invisible, ephemeral, sudden, catastrophic, seasonal and endless.” Drawn from poets and philosophers, scientists and naturalists, diarists and playwrights, from ancient to modern, the 300 entries are vibrant, evocative, and sometimes surprising. Samuel Johnson deemed weather especially interesting to Englishmen because of the unpredictability of the nation’s climate: “We therefore rejoice mutually at good weather, as at an escape from something that we feared; and mutually complain of bad, as of the loss of something that we hoped.” Hawthorne, Dickens, and T.S. Eliot are among many who remark on fog, “an atmosphere proper to huge, grimy London” according to Hawthorne. Oscar Wilde takes a more generous view. “Where, if not from the Impressionists,” he writes, “do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?” Ruskin, Wordsworth, Descartes, and, not surprisingly, the painter John Constable are among those entranced by clouds. Edvard Munch reveals inner drama aroused by a blood-red sunset: “I stood there trembling with angst—and I felt as though a vast, endless Scream passed through nature.” Henry James comments on novelists’ particular atmospherics. “Why is it,” he wonders, “that in George Eliot the sun sinks forever to the west, and the shadows are long, and the afternoon wanes, and the trees vaguely rustle, and the colour of the day is much inclined to yellow?” Mark Twain, however, explains why weather will not appear in his novel The American Claimant. “Weather is a literary specialty,” he opines, “and no untrained hand can turn out a good article of it.” Other meteorological observers include Homer, Dante, Swift, Proust, Dickinson, Didion, and Kafka.

A delightful collection.