When snow covers a landscape, it uncovers the bare bones of the land: a seeming paradox.The hollows, bumps and edges of our world are both softened and accentuated by a layer of snow.Our hearts leap up when we behold a morning of dazzling snow that has fallen silently in the night.Snow landscapes seduce us to pause and listen to "the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."This elegant quote from Stevens' poem "The Snow Man" suggests that we listen carefully as we look since the sounds of snow are less silent than we imagine, yet more silent than our dreams.As we feel, see, hear and smell snow's presence, some intriguing change in our relationship to the land slips quietly into play.The many seeming sensual contradictions about snow enchant us and make us forget ourselves.Inner and outer merge in snow.Paralleling our response to snow and under the influence of Japanese art, the best of American snow painting of the late 19th century tempts the listener to use all of our senses as we dissolve into art of air that is "alive with feathery flakes descending."'Japanese art brought snow to the attention of American artists and taught them to relate to nature through touch, hearing, and smell instead of offering the land as a "vision" (either literally as something to look at or as a symbol for some idea) as American landscapes prior to this time had often been.This new "American" view is not ashamed of its metaphysical overtones and invites the same union of subject and object that our actual experience of snow does.Although Americans learned much about how to approach snowy landscapes, what these artists discovered in snow was a nothingness that differs from Japanese perceptions of snow.First the differences between snowy and commonplace landscapes.Snow results from a mysterious dance of ordinaly elements; water molecules, pieces of the earth, dust, and cold wind.These unremarkable elements are transformed as snow is created six miles above the earth 2 and the snow that falls in turn transforms the land and atmosphere we are accustomed to.Land unadorned by snow is other.It is in-itself, resisting the impact of light and wind.For example, though not immune to all the sky's nuances, fields of corn stand up to the light, forebear the sun's power.Ordinary landscapes cannot completely resist the play of the shadow's colors or the spangle of the noon sun, but in general its being proclaims an independence from the sky.However, we are astonished when we perceive the new reality created by a sonwstorm in the night: a new world is present.The snow surface, like its liquid sister, has a new relationship with sky and light.The pinks, yellows, mauves, and salmons of
Jo Ellen Jacobs (Mon,) studied this question.