Now that's a better way to get to a mountain. We hied ourselves to Union Station before 7, took a slow train (partly because of the terrain, partly because this country hates public transportation) to Winter Park, and disembarked 100 feet from a lift.
The ride is lovely. Anything is better than the I-70 corridor to begin with, especially with ski traffic. Boulders and snow and creeks and elk and two hours of scenery. Sometimes I watched the world go by; sometimes I read A Whistling Woman.
Of course, the base temperature at 9,000' was 0. Two thousand feet higher up, that much colder. Plus windchill. And falling snow. And blowing snow.
I wore a face mask, a headband, a hat, and goggles: no skin showing. My head was warm, though my peripheral vision (does that include up and down?) was severely compromised. And contacts, which I have to get more of Real Soon Now. My goggles fogged, as did RDC's glasses and goggles to the point he shucked his glasses and skied blind (relatively: two layers of fog being worse than no correction). I wore an undershirt, a turtleneck, a fleece, and a shell. I wore two pair of pants, fleece and goretex. None of me was cold.
Except my wrists. And my fingers.
I need to get gloves with gaiters. I wore glove liners under my gloves, with some sort of chemical hand-warming pads in the palms. I couldn't possibly arrange the gear on my head with lined and gloved hands, but with the face mask on, my teeth couldn't assist with the gloving of my hands. Liners first, head fleece second, then gloves. Thus the pulling down of the glove cuffs didn't happen. Nor the snugging of shell cuffs by velcro over glove cuffs didn't happen. Thus cold wrists.
And my fingers were cold despite the hand-warming pads in the palms. Numb. Stiff.
However, I can feel the difference in my legs. Winter Park has a lot of traversing. I've always been better than RDC at traversing, because of shorter skis and ice-skating, but it still sucks. At the least sign of any slope, this time, both of us would tuck. Tail way up, upper body over, all weight in the toes, to get the most out of whatever little hill there was.
At the end of the day, I didn't feel like a length of chewed string. I felt like a piece of frozen string, sure, but not chewed. That's an improvement.
So. Damn. Cold.
What I said before:
Chapter 1: Noo, not italics! Don't begin the book in italics. Empire Falls might not have disappointed me if it hadn't soured me at the start with the overlong section in italics. No (whew), Byatt uses them for a reason, as she did in Babel Tower.
Chapter 2: A perhaps not overly warm father of three (pertinent) children, Carla, Ellis, and Annie, in Yorkshire of course. I love it when Byatt is obvious, because only then do I follow her.
I just learned the word phlogiston, which might be spelled differently in British English since in A Whistling Woman it is "phlogistin": the hypothetical principle of fire regarded formerly as a material substance.
At least, I hope the spelling is deliberately different, because just a few pages farther on someone is described as having been to Haight-Ashbery [sic].
However, I also just learned (not from the book, but from looking up a name that appeared in the book) that Vivasvat is "the Hindu god of the sun as divinity, also regarded as the architect who built the cities of the gods. His consort is Saranya, and his children are Yama, Yami, Manu, and the Asvins." Also that the name Agnes means "lamb" and thus "pure." Of course: the French for lamb is agneau. I did already know that Agnes is much more attractive pronounced frainchly than Englishly, more like "Ahn-ngay."
It's a second printing. I am going to believe these are editors' rather than Byatt's mistakes.
Later. There is always something of the last book you read in the next. Here's a bit of Summerland in Woman: "Telling stories, like making graven images, made loopholes for evil and the Father of Lies to enter the world."
Saturday. "He had asked his father, once, as a little boy 'Why is there something, and not nothing?'"
I asked RDC if he was familiar with the phenomenon by which the last book you read turns up in the next. He answered, unkindly as well as wrongly, "That's probably because you read a lot of the same sort of stuff."
What I took note of throughout (sans spoilers:
Eek. The full moon never rises before sunset. She knows everything else. It's such a simple oversight to correct, though, and there's a short story by someone whom I dislike at some remove, with the same error.
Another book connection! Frederica feels the ground beneath her feet. And twins throughout, John and Paul Ottokar from Babel Tower continue here, and much reliance on syzygy.
I also wonder if Byatt responds to Girl with a Pearl Earring or if the discussion of Vermeer's View of Delft is coincidental.
And she does know everything or at least thinks about it. Snails and the link between mind and matter. Songbirds and how they learn. The Great Gatsby. A Winter's Tale. Middlemarch. Peacocks and how males attract mates (echoes of "Morpho Eugenia"). Meiosis and the energy cost of sexual vs. asexual reproduction. All this set against university upheaval, religious sects, psychology, feminism, the impact of television.
An Amazon reviewer said that Whistling Woman doesn't stand alone. This is so. The jacket declares it does, but all of a sudden Winifred appears without introduction, and Jude Mason and Babbletower, and Alexander's "Yellow Chair." It's wonderful, a joyous intellectual romp in which Byatt thinks and wonders and examines and encourages her readers to do the same. But I don't think it stands alone.
I would have been pleased to know more about what happens to everyone, especially Frederica, but I really like how and why Byatt doesn't tell.