Exuberance: The Passion for Life Read online

  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.

  Bentley’s enthusiasm for snowflakes would be simply a footnote in the annals of enthusiasts and eccentrics were it not for the results of his sustained passion, for it was a passion which allowed him to withstand the chill of both winter and his Vermont neighbors. He endured the inevitable frustrations and failures involved in capturing and photographing a solitary snow crystal before it melted into nothingness because he felt an urgency that others did not. Bentley’s temperament and sensibilities impelled him to share beauty with those less exposed to it and to proselytize those who felt less acutely than he. His exuberance brought to millions a loveliness that fell from the skies. He saw, he felt, and he captured a tiny gorgeousness for history. No bit of Nature ever had a better Boswell.

  Bentley loved snowflakes above all else, but he also made important contributions to the understanding of other phenomena of nature. He observed and carefully described the date, appearance, and intensities of more than six hundred auroras and took meticulous measurements of nearly three hundred fifty collections of raindrops. He was a pioneer photographer of clouds, frost, and dew, and his work on cloud physics, in the assessment of Blanchard and other atmospheric scientists, was forty years ahead of its time.

  The people in his New England village, however, regarded him as a little cracked. Being Vermont farmers and less than transfixed by snow, they found Bentley’s intoxication odd. Why take pictures of snowflakes, they asked, when “you can’t sell them and you can’t eat them.” Fortunately, the American Meteorological Society disagreed and awarded the self-educated dairy farmer its first research grant. His photomicrographs of snow crystals made their way into scientific journals—sixty were published in Nature alone—as well as into popular newspapers and magazines, and they influenced naturalists, photographers, scientists, and jewelry designers at Tiffany. There is no equivalent of his photographic collection, nor is it likely that there will ever be one.

  When Bentley died in 1931, even his Vermont neighbors had a sense of the importance of his life and passing. “John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing,” wrote his hometown newspaper. “Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look.”

  Nor had they his capacity for joy or exuberant pursuit. “So long as eyes shall see and kindle at the beautiful in Nature,” Bentley said, his camera and pen would be there. It was this capacity to be kindled, of course, that set Bentley apart. His urgency and passion ensured that his message would be both seen and heard. The physicist W. J. Humphreys, one of the many eminent scientists who were deeply impressed by his work, wrote the text to accompany Bentley’s photographic masterpiece, Snow Crystals. In it, he observed that Bentley had pursued his life’s work with the “insistent ardor of the lover and the tireless patience of the scientist,” that he had “made it possible for others to share at leisure, and by the comfortable fireside, the joys that hour after hour bound him to his microscope and his camera in an ice cold shed.” Bentley brought indoors an otherwise invisible beauty from the skies.

  Bentley’s was a magnificent obsession, plumb-line true and enduring. Just days before he died, he wrote in his weather notebook for the last time. “Cold west wind afternoon,” the entry reads. “Snow flying.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Playing Fields of the Mind”

  (photo credit 3.1)

  For most mammals, including ourselves, early exploration of the world is enhanced, indeed often made possible, through the exuberant play of youth. Such play, it has been said, is the business of childhood, but play is more than that: it is a deadly serious business. Much learning must get done in not much time, for youth is, indeed, a stuff which will not endure. The time is short when a young animal, still protected and provided for by its parents and not yet bound to the waiting demands of hunting, mating, and procuring shelter, can run flat out, gambol, and improvise with impunity. “In the sun that is young once only,” wrote Dylan Thomas, “Time let me play and be/Golden in the mercy of his means.”

  We play because we have an exuberance of spirits and energy, but we are also exuberant because we play. We seek to play not only because it is a part of our evolutionary history, but because we know that more often than not it will bring pleasure. That pleasure, in turn, makes us more likely to act in ways that increase our chances of survival and sway. Long before our species adapted to the seasons and terrains dealt us by nature, other animals had learned how best to capture food and reach water, how to outflank predators, to be aware of their own and wary of strangers. They had evolved ways to fashion strong bonds with kin and learned the particulars of their home territories through exploration and risks taken. A coupling of instinct with learning, of pleasurable play with group bonding, of joy with curiosity and invention meant that animals with such capacities were more likely to respond with facility to changes in their environment. The varieties and combinations of behaviors tried out in play were among those that increased the odds of behavioral flexibility. Play exists, in significant measure, to promote plasticity and to teach an animal to take advantage of opportunity.

  Play is a vital facilitator, shaper, and motivator: it allows the pleasurable practice of improbable twists and turns in instinctive behaviors which, in turn, creates for the animal a wider range of possibilities for future actions. It shapes the developing brain in potentially lifesaving ways. “Natural selection,” wrote the philosopher Karl Groos in 1898, “will favour individuals in whom instinct appears only in an imperfect form, manifesting itsel
f in early youth in activity purely for exercise and practice—that is to say, in animals which play.” It is not unlikely, Groos went on to say, that “the very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play.”

  By its nature, play is rather diffusely defined; the origins of the word remain surprisingly obscure. Plein, meaning, in Middle Dutch, “to dance about, jump for joy,” is thought to be a linguistic ancestor of the English word play; so, too, is the Old German word Spilan, denoting a “light, floating movement.” “Play” takes up seventeen long columns and accounts for more than one hundred individual definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. To these, modern science has added its own numbingly precise ones. Most definitions center on a feeling of free or unimpeded movement; activities involving fun and amusement and characterized by swift, exuberant, irregular, or capricious motions; and a springing, flying, or darting to and fro, a joyous gamboling and frolicking about.