Thursday, December 02, 2004

Cold Northern Blues

The New York Times has an article today on the strategies Icelanders employ to beat the winter blues. Well, The Angry Anthropologist had a colleague in grad school from Rekyavik and can attest to the power of positive thinking to beat the depressing whiteness of an Iowa winter (FYI - first February in Iowa City it hit -34 degrees) - she didn't mind it at all. I was reminded by this eloquent passage in the article:

Sitting at his usual table at the cafe with his usual entourage of five coffee-drinking friends, Gunnar Dal, a renowned novelist and philosopher, described the darkness as "just another shade of light." When you commune alone with the cold and the dark under the starry Icelandic sky, he said, "you're nearer to your own soul; you realize that you're there for a purpose.

No comments: