February 1

It is winter now and the snows can come. It’s good to warm yourself before a roaring fire on a winter’s night. Lowell Thomas, in persuading me to take up cross-country skiing, said, “To glide quietly on the snow into a grove of great old trees, their bare branches lifted to a cloudless blue sky, and to listen to the palpable silence, is to live in depth.” In return, I quoted to him Thomas Carlyle’s thoughtful line, “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.”