Cloudy with a Chance of Existentialism: Taking the Weather Personally

         Spring has arrived and as usual, someone has forgotten to tell Minnesota. I came back from “spring” break to find a series of dark, cold days. Last Tuesday, I was sitting in my American Lit class, discussing representations of death and religion in Modernist poetry (yes, this is what I’ve dedicated my life too). I was understandably exhausted, it being the first day of class after break, and began to zone out, focusing instead on the barren tree outside the window.

I realized it was one of those days where the sky appeared to be perpetually trapped between dark and light. Wind howled against the glass. The florescent lights inside put up minimal effort, leaving the corners of the room dark and students’ faces shaded. All form a rather oppressive environment to be discussing how God is dead and one day you will be to.

            J.D. Salinger once wrote, “Poets are always taking the weather so personally.” I think this sentiment can apply to all writers. When you begin to set up your life as scenes to be observed and recorded, every phenomenon is viewed as contributing to the overall mood of your environment. This may sound ridiculous, but see if this feeling is familiar to you: A suddenly sunny day makes you feel like your Calculus test might actually go okay. Rain on a morning where your car wouldn’t start seems like adding insult to injury. The weather can start to appear like it’s designed to heighten whatever emotion you’re already wrestling with.

            Of course, there are mental disorders where the season can actually affect someone’s mood, causing depression at the same time each year. I do not suffer from that illness. I’m just a college student occasionally bored in class. But my gloom got me thinking, what if we responded to the changes in weather like literary characters did?

            What if when the summer became sweltering hot, you just knew your neighbor was going to end up murdered in a pool? What if you saw a few strange lightning strikes and started killing everybody (actually, I’m seeing a pattern of using nature to justify violence, whoops)? This is a literary device called the pathetic fallacy, which attributes human qualities and emotions to inanimate objects of nature. Weather is another way to set the tone, to convey eeriness or rage without having to explicitly state, “it was tense.” But imagine if that magical meteorological power came over real life and weather reports started to read like horoscopes that were actually accurate. Sunny with a chance of lost tempers. Cloudy with a chance of existential crisis. It would be fascinating for about a day, and then we would have to figure out what to do with all the bodies.