December - Ernst Jünger

First published in 1962 in the “Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung”.

The poem by Lichtwer was kindly translated by Sōþ & Secg. Check out his page here:

https://twitter.com/SoothText

October coloured the leaves, November clipped them, December covered them with its fabric. Then comes maturity, dying, and death.

December, the iron moon and wolf moon of the ancients, has always been considered a harsh lord. With it winter begins, but like all seasons, it does not arrive according to the calendar. It arrives earlier or later than the date set by Caesar, and may even skip one or more years. We must look for it in space, not time. It descends from the eternal snows of the high mountains on which it lives, down to the tropics; it dominates the polar solitude. From there it sweeps with fading light over the nations of wolves and bears. The birds of the North fly before it. It brings under its cloak frost, night, death – but also something more, something greater for those who know how to turn the cloth inside out.

Above all, the fabric: the death shroud that December drapes over the earth, whose dimensions follow its great and small rhythms – the alternation of day and night, north wind and thaw, mild and icy seasons. Here, frost’s kinship with death becomes spatially visible: the way it slumbers in the impenetrable or inescapable, spreading out as the light fades and disappears. Forms become simpler and clearer, pattern emerges at the expense of colour. The tree outside our window has changed overnight, now showing its inner frame. We see the dark trunk, shafts, and branch angles behind the matt filigree of its fine twigs. In the field, the emptiness seems to absorb a great deal of colour – so that the fir trees stand like a black wall in front of the white mountains. The brook, the willows along its banks, the mole-hills sticking out from under the snow, are all drawn sparingly and powerfully, as if in ink. The hedge where blue wormwood bloomed in July has become a black fence surrounded by white fans. As forms emerge from uncertainty, they acquire the power to count and measure. They follow the laws of the crystalline world, its hermetic limitation that binds matter together and reveals its dimensions. In the mountains, this geometric line becomes even more precise; lines like engraved diamonds, from the contours of ridges and peaks to the tracks of sledges and snowshoes.

In small and close quarters, colours are better protected and live in isolation. In the garden, apart from roses, only cabbage, a polar vegetable, has survived the frost. The snow on its wavy leaves has melted and frozen overnight and catches the eye like green, star-spangled feathers. Even the parsley, buried deep in the snow in the herb bed by the kitchen stairs, shines the brightest green colour. The gardener calls it “Mooskrause”.

The forest is lonelier, quieter than in summer; its silence all the deeper because the thin air carries sounds far away. A squirrel nibbles cones, a woodpecker taps on dead wood as with a hammer. There are traces in the snow: spiders and red-brown seed pods under spruce trees, grey and pale-green lichens on old oaks. There, in the sparse woods, we see the drummer flying up the trunks, swooping along in arched flight, its belly plumage glowing red.

The winter woods do not even seem to obey the red colour, such as the round, domed breast of the common bullfinch, which rests in small flocks on the hunting hedges, or comes out into the meadows to visit the village vegetable gardens. The crossbill is much more secretive in snow-covered pine forests; the male is brick-red, while the female, like the bullfinch, is more modestly coloured. She broods in the deepest winter, not allowing herself to leave the nest lest the eggs burst from the frost. The male provides them with food.

The crossbill is also known as the “Christ bird”. In it the feathered world is an analogue to the Christmas rose in our gardens and woods, which often blooms as early as Christmas.

White can both hide and destroy the colour world, but at the same time it enlivens and enhances certain tones of the palette. So how do we resolve this contradiction? Perhaps we can imagine white in the great game of light as the banker who can both make the individual win and offer nothing to the whole – as a power that encompasses and dominates the multitude.

This hypothesis is confirmed when, in favourable lighting, we see white unleashing the coloured world to its fullest. A good example is a large patch of snow that has melted in the middle of the day and frozen again by evening. In the light it glows like yellowed satin with printed patterns, and the shadows have a bluish tinge. When it has snowed in the afternoon, on a windless day, the flakes lie lightly against this background, but each one is a star. Now, in the rays of the setting sun, myriads of diamonds shine.

As frost spreads through space, so night spreads through time. Both threaten life, limit it, deprive it of warmth and light. The sun rises above the horizon in ever flatter arcs. The days grow shorter, the nights longer – further north they turn into night, polar night in the highest degree.

The meadow is lonely, inhabited only by animals protected by fur or plumage. Blackbirds and finches gather by the barns, foxes roam near the stables, deer nibble twigs in the orchards. At night, wild boars tear up the rented plots. The north grows darker, colder, and quieter; towns and villages become sparse and eventually disappear. Snow covers the vast plains, forests, tundra, swamps down to those latitudes where the dwarf birch gives way to lichens and mosses, covers Greenland with all its islands and seas and finally the desert lands of the Arctic.

The bear now sleeps in the hollow of a tree, the squirrel in his nest; the woodchuck, the hamster, and the field mouse sink into their burrows deep beneath the snow. One lives by what has been brought in, by what summer has allowed to grow, by what autumn has allowed to ripen, by the stores in cellars and attics, by the life force we have accumulated.

Winter consumes not only where the father of the family still manages the stocks, but also in the big cities with their markets and lights, with their seemingly inexhaustible wealth. But winter has not contributed to this; it attaches itself to abundance like a shadow to light. It comes from areas and times it cannot control. When the harvest from our own land is not enough, we draw abundance from foreign climates or from the sea, where memories of milder times on land remain.

The power of summers past warms and illuminates every time candles or fires are lit in huts and houses, villages and towns. In wax, wood, oil, and coal, in everything that fuels flame and heat, the extinguished suns come to life. They still work deep within seemingly inanimate things and give them life. Without the sun, no power station is possible.

Those who have not prepared for winter suffer the same fate as the cricket in the fable. When December comes, it is too late. The ant has come into play: we have seen its caravans on the war roads in the heather. Some were picking fruit, others transporting prey from the hunt. Now the burrow is closed and well inhabited. In March, as the sun warms the woods, a black pack will appear. The same thing happens wherever people hibernate. Even hibernation has to be prepared for, the hibernator feeds on autumn fertiliser and is warmed by the fur it has grown over the summer.

In November we took care of what we managed to save and preserve. The chimneys were cleaned, the windows were boarded up, and the cellar was covered with straw. In the garden we cleared the last beds and covered the roses with branches. The first snow fell overnight and a quiet morning awaited us. Before school the children make more noise than usual: they come back late from the hills.

It is a time when people bond, become more sociable, gather around the fire and candlelight. Closed and sheltered spaces become cosy, from weather stations at the North Pole to igloos where lamps burn, from brightly lit theatres in the cities to hotels in high snowy valleys, from Russian peasant houses with their huge cookers to the chimneys of farms on the southern slopes whose evergreen gardens are damaged by frost only in the harshest winters.

Sometimes you may hear old people say that the weather has become more unimpressive and mild. But there is always the winter of the century, which covers even the largest lakes with ice and destroys olive and orange trees in the south.

It is true, however, that the seasons harmonise with the mind and man’s way of life. Even in winter the shops are full of flowers and fruit. A glance out of an airplane reveals deserts, which not so long ago were deadly regions crossed with sledges and dogs. The power of the elements is now recognised only in disasters. With the growth of conveniences we have, of course, lost much of that old cosiness which December brought and animates Dutch ice-skating scenes and Dickens’ novels – poems such as Lichtwer’s “Winter” have all but disappeared:

Now the smoking boulder sends to us
The white, shimmering flakes, as thus,
The shiver of ice takes flight.
The fields, the bushes, the hills,
The gardens, the alleys, the sills,
Dressed in all white.

The water, that ships cut through,
Carries sleds and wagons and crew
And is a hardened glass now set.
The chill turns rivers to bridges
And returns from petrified wedges
To a fleeting and supple wet.

Dear Heaven! How the rattling spit stokes,
Guiding us through forests of oaks,
Shells of resin inwove.
How the tops of houses smoke,
How the burning twigs crackle and stoke,
Oh how soothing you are, wood-stove!

At last the carefree gluttonous pigs
Pay with their flesh and bones for digs,
For shelter, and feed.
At last one fills the chimney with sausages
With ham, the princes’ food that is,
With bacon, the housekeepers’ solace indeed.

Belief, children, a cheerful form,
Six cones of sugar, a room that is warm,
A quintal of coffee lain,
A cask of canon’s drink anoints,
This strengthens the frozen joints,
This helps the chilling pain.

But all comfort remains at the edges, where safety is kept with narrow limits. On a thin strip of land rescued from an inhospitable world, both are felt and savoured. Home emerges like light from the shadows, out of the uncanny. Our age has expanded these boundaries; man spends the winter where no animal, no plant can thrive, no algae can survive. But what difference does it make that man can more quickly and reliably deliver supplies that were brought forth in other times and in other zones?

December is not only night and cold; every year it touches life like the wing of a bird sure of its prey. It is not only the month of winter, but also the month of death, and it has always been seen this way. If in November we remember loved ones who have died, in December death itself enters our consciousness and, even more strongly, our dreams. Behind the frost and darkness lies the cold of death, the night of death. In winter storms and atmospheric forces we hear the cries of ghosts and wild hunters; in dark nights the departed approach more clearly than usual. All this comes from afar, as the vanguard of a force with which neither restlessness nor cunning can compare. Death stretches out its horns. All precautions can only give a reprieve.

Behind man’s anxiety over the return of the sun lies the knowledge that one day it will be extinguished forever, and eternal winter will begin. When we touch the hand of a dead person, we feel a shiver that all imaginable cold only hints at, and we are invaded by a darkness against which even the blackest night seems a mere shadow. Where have they gone, those who shared our days? We call in vain, they do not hear us. To see them again is the great, the only hope that will never fade.

The shortest day is in December. The light is threatened, so we cherish it; the hard moon is also the Christmas moon. From a decorated Christmas tree, lights shine like stars on the trees of the world. The light becomes warmer, more subtle. Where it becomes festive, it outshines the splendour of spring, the radiance of summer days: it is not just a new light, but a second light.

The shortest day is also the day when everything begins anew. The sun begins the cycle of the year. We have endured the winter night and look forward to a new happy period. We give gifts to our children, to our loved ones: this is how the great star gives us life again.

But in the other light, hope is stronger than any change. Here we approach what we seek in vain elsewhere, and if we look to Sirius: the certainty that we will survive not only the winter night, but also the night of death. The light renewing itself in the universe and replacing the darkness is but a reflection of that eternal light which in the changing and returning suns and stars has always been felt and honoured by mankind.