The world has changed. It’s no longer your daily world, full of humdrum, everyday sadness and happiness, lost in the delirium of chaotic over-activity leading to nothingness. It’s nothingness itself, in the deepest sense of the world, anything but that. The winters have come.
The winters have come. And the campus is a cold paradise, an icy heaven of staggering beauty, untethered from the shackles of space and time, existing in the oneness and nothingness of eternity.
It’s evening, and I’m walking in the campus. It’s amazingly beautiful. Everything around me is bathed completely in mist. The fog has conquered the world, conquered the light. The fog floats all around me, it permeates my skin, and reaches down to the very core of my bones. I breathe fog, and its icy smell alters my sense of reality. A hazy, grayish darkness has taken over the evening, a darkness which feels so permanent that it feels that we have been living in this artificial darkness for eternity, a darkness complete in itself, which doesn’t need light to complement its nature.
The street lamps along the road are waging solitary, futile struggles against the all-encompassing fog, disappearing into a dreamy oblivion as one goes along his path. The path itself is blinded by fog, obliterating its past with each footstep and veiling the future with white shadows of uncertainty. It’s like being marooned on a mobile island, which never lets you get away from it, forever stranded amidst the infinite sea of fog.
The trees have become more silent than usual, and every tree, with a few stranded rays of dull light, coursing through it, reminds me of weeping willows. It’s as if they’ve gone to sleep, finally weary of the eternal commotion around them, taking the sound of the birds, and the wind, with them.
The talk of two students passing by me, about coding in android, is blasphemy for my ears. I think, “It’s sacrilege! To talk about technology as you walk around in the enchanted kingdom of winter.” The silence around you admonishes you for your wayward thoughts.
Aahh…winters! Winter evokes in one, the deepest, most primeval of emotions, inexpressible in any languages, existing since ages when language was yet to be invented. The wordless, pristine, other-worldly emotions, which can only be approximated by death, silence, love, sadness and a feeling of profound, eternal loneliness. You are weighed down, crushed by the weight of your emotions which you can’t comprehend, emotions which resonate to something beyond yourself, beyond humanity, beyond God, something which can only be called Nature.
Prairie Wind 