The Splendor of Ice
. . . through the eyes and words of Mark Twain
How my family loves Mark Twain! Over the years we have passed the time on many a car journey reading aloud from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court. Twain’s voice is nearly always satiric, and peppered with preposterous exaggeration. But every so often he writes seriously, as in his concluding paragraph of a humorous commentary, Speech on the Weather (in New England). He concedes that the beauty of autumn foliage there makes up for the severity and unpredictability of weather the rest of the year. Then he finishes his essay with a rhapsodic description of a winter phenomenon that eclipses even that: the ice storm. I quote from that portion:
When a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top--ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. The wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold--the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremist possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.
A “sparkling” moment in photojournalism.”