It was a beautiful wedding--Douglas firs, fantastic flowers, and green lawns overlooking the incredible blues of the Pacific. There was great food, dancing music, and many witty and wise sentiments expressed by the New Jersey/Sicilian and Northwest/Irish-American clans being united by the love of two fine young people. The weather was stunning, a small miracle for any time of the year in the Northwest, and I was enjoying myself. Still, between the fresh salmon, the intriguing pasta salad, the cold champagne and sinfully chocolate wedding cake, not to mention the wild dances, I felt a nagging melancholy. Trying to understand this feeling my mind wandered. In the bright unusual sunshine a surprising phrase drifted into my head: Winter is coming.
Winter is coming is the slogan of House Stark in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy epic Ice and Fire, whose first HBO season (“Game of Thrones”) is a big hit. In his fantasy world autumn doesn’t always follow three months after summer, nor summer come regularly after spring, or spring predictably after winter. The seasons are irregular. Winters and summers can stretch to decades. Each is unique. Some summers are long and wonderful and some winters are severe beyond imaginings
So why did this phrase come into my mind? I contemplated the wedding party. These were good people: hard-working, good-looking, smart, articulate. The Bride and Groom were in the spring of their lives and were dazzling. Their parents, reaping the harvest of many years, were just as attractive, albeit less shiny, with some gray and hints of white in the hair, and a little less spry on the dance floor, yet assured and at ease. Their parents, the elders, were older, of course, yet clearly happy. Their seasons were coming to an end and they seemed content to watch their grandchildren thrive. Maybe this was the source of my unease? I am clearly in the autumn of my own years and I can remember, as if it were yesterday, so many weddings and commitment ceremonies from my youth, when I was as young as the Bride and Groom. For all of us the seasons rush by, faster and faster it seems, until our personal winter comes.
By the fifth book of Ice and Fire the House of Stark is decimated by the evil of others, through their own love, and even because of their wonderful sense of honor. Their home, Winterfell, is sacked and burned. Eddard Stark, the Lord of the house and his successor Robb, the Young Wolf, are both dead. Lady Catelyn is a half-dead vengeance zombie, Sansa, the eldest daughter is imprisoned, the youngest daughter, the spunky Arya, is training to be an assassin, the current Lord, Bran, is a young cripple in hiding and his little brother Rickon is lost in the wilderness. Of course, it could be worse. It can always be worse. But the end of the road is the same for all, as the Starks well know. For each of us an endless winter, death, will come.
“Was that it?” I wondered to myself as I watched the Swarthmore alumni (the Bride and Groom met there) dance madly to a Lady Gaga song. But no, much as I enjoy thinking about my individual death (hey, I’m a philosopher, memento mori and all that) I realized that what I felt was more than the melancholy of mortality. It was more than sadly reflecting (and jealously noting) the fast fading youth at the wedding. In Martin’s world aging is obvious and individual deaths might be tragic or even horrible yet they happen all the time. They are not what Winter is Coming is about. The Starks don’t fear death; they fear not doing their duty and their duty is for their people to survive winter. We all die the Starks know. They are warning of a more cosmic kind of winter.
Our own personal passing is not the problem. Maybe you believe you’ll come back as another creature, or continue on down the road somewhere else (let us hope, heaven?), or maybe you feel this is all there is (as I do). That’s fine. Death is natural, we all agree on that, even if we don’t know what comes next. What is not acceptable is civilization, maybe even humanity, being destroyed. In Martin’s made-up world the longest summer in history is coming to an end and it is clear that incredible dangers (the Others mainly) are threatening the very existence of humans. And that is when I realized what was bothering me.
The human race here on Earth has had a long summer. A few hundred thousand years ago there were only a few thousand humans. Since then we have done very well. There are billions of us now, and we are everywhere. No other mega fauna (big animals) is as successful, and the most common are our own creations: dogs, cats, cattle, pigs, sheep, horses. We are the most “successful” large species we know of throughout all natural history. Good, hardworking people, like the folks at the wedding, can live like the kings and queens of old. No, better than that, longer and better. Yes, billions of our fellow humans have much more difficult lives, but for all the unnecessary suffering of so many individual humans today, most of us still live better than the vast majority of humans have ever, and many of us live very well indeed.
But Winter is coming. Our success threatens our existence. It isn’t just one thing: postmodern war (especially weapons of mass destruction), or global climate change, or the inevitable pandemic our proliferation promises. It is all these things and more. As in Ice and Fire, humanity has grown overly proud, it has temporarily suppressed the unpredictable (nature) and what it doesn't understand (magic) and most of the elite only schemes for power (the “game of thrones”) and cares not at all for the needs of the world (realm). Few hear the warnings of the Night Watch, on the Wall in the North, who have seen evil waxing stronger.
Let me be clear, I don’t know Martin’s politics. I’m not saying that this is what he means by Winter is Coming. If his writing experience is anything like mine sometimes the story takes on a life of its own. If so, he doesn’t even know himself what Winter is Coming means. That is what happens with great story; it is part of life. So it has its lessons if we can but see them.
The lesson here is that summer cannot last forever, but winter can. We live at a great cusp in history. As bad as much of the past has been, it was still the time of the Knights of Summer. Humanity was not in danger then, it is now. Through our own great powers of destruction (biological and chemical weapons) and production (overpopulation and the climate change and threat of pandemic it creates) we have put ourselves in incredible peril. Yet the world is being run for a tiny elite using their short-term profit as the deciding criteria and democracy is under attack everywhere. So, even when I should just be happy, at an amazing wedding with people I care about and admire deeply, I cannot ignore that we stagger at the edge the abyss. Once I realized this I appreciated the wedding more than ever, because I consciously accepted that it was a solemn ritual of life and death. Maybe that’s just me, but I’m always uneasy when I forget just how precarious our lives are.
For that is our lot, in our summers and our winters both. But especially now, in these interesting times when so much is at stake. This shadows, and inevitably sharpens, my daily joys and gives focus to my moments. At my writing or attending weddings or in the fantasy world of Ice and Fire, I cannot deny that our world is in great danger. Beautiful rituals and great literature remind me and strengthen my resolve to do what I can. Now more than ever, to save our world we need to step up and do our duty. Because Winter is coming.