Booktalk

The whole Northeast is under its winter blanket; 49 of our 50 states are tasting snow. Birds labor at the feeders, icicles brocade the gutter pipes, and leaks from the rooftop snow-pack worry down the the wallpaper. I am very much in its grip - not suffering, but definitely circumscribed by its depth, breath, and icy reach.

But all of that is tempered by the book I am reading; Boris Pasternak's, Doctor Zhivago.

It is Russia before, during, and after the October Revolution. Desolation, cruelty, and constant oppression stalk that world of hardship, confusion, and war. My winter pales by comparison.

It is a rich story. One in no hurry of being told. Unlike the movie version, it is not about a romance framed by a world-shaping event; rather, it is about whether one should or can live a personal life even as social cataclysms swirl and faceless forces seek to redefine the framework of normal life.

Indeed, the relentless landscape of Russia, the ceaseless cycle of politics, and the weather of historical events do not subjugate life for Zhivago. He argues for humanity, for beauty, for tenderness - not the political and social conventions that we invent.

And so I toss another log into the wood stove and gauge the thermometer on the porch. Then I return to the taiga, to the locomotives buried in the snow, to the homeless chaos of that epoch, and to the odyssey of Zhivago who survives not by cleverness, but by his close-held humanity with which he hopes to out-flank loss and celebrate life; even in Winter.