PATHETIC FALLACY...

 

It’s 3am and the rain is absolutely hammering on my north-facing bedroom window, driven by an early autumn gale.  It’s happening again.  Summer is over, and reality is hitting home…

 

Since moving to live by the sea, I’ve become weather-obsessed.  I’ve lost count of how many weather apps I have on my phone; I watch the Countryfile forecast every Sunday night; it’s a moment of triumph when I get a like or a retweet from a weather presenter when I tweet a weather-related photograph or two. 

 

Growing up, and living until my late 20s in cities, of course I noticed weather:  I mean, I noticed whether it was warm or cold, raining or sunny; I looked forward to snow days and picked up on my mother’s dread of thunderstorms.  But I don’t think I really saw weather until I moved north to the seaside.  When you’re in the city, you notice it growing darker, cooler, and the rain beginning; you reach for your umbrella or gather your coat around you.  Where I live, I often watch impressive squalls travel towards us from Islay and Jura to the east, or Donegal to the west.  You can quite literally watch the weather as it heads towards you. 

 

Living within sight, and sound, of the sea has changed my life.  Not because I’m a cool surfer or an intrepid cold-water swimmer (though don’t think I haven’t considered trying both), but because it makes me look at the world surrounding me.  Sometimes, after an especially trying day, I drive down to the large car-park at the water’s edge and just watch.  Whether it’s a beautiful summer afternoon and I’m watching couples holding hands and families enjoying ice creams, or a stormy day like today when there’s barely anyone around, it’s hard to see your problems as very significant when you’re looking at that huge expanse of water, stretching to the horizon.  Watching the waves crashing onto the headland and outlying islands, as they are today, can make you feel oddly better.  It’s almost as if the elements are sharing your emotions.  Telling you it’s ok to feel sad, frustrated, frightened or upset.  Because for every day that the sea is thunderous, there will be days when it’s a perfect, rippled expanse of silk. 

 

Northern Ireland, we’re being told, is standing on the brink:  the Covid-19 ‘second wave’ is here, and it’s about to crash right over us if something doesn’t happen to hold it back.  There’s talk of short lockdowns or ‘circuit breakers’.  It’s definitely a weekend when an Atlantic storm feels very much like pathetic fallacy.  Human emotions or situations being reflected in the weather or natural surroundings… we think we’re so terribly important, don’t we, that what’s happening to us is reflected by the weather. The trope is everywhere in fiction: the rainy funeral, the beautiful sunset love scene, the perfect, crisp white Christmas.  I’m starting to wonder if there’s something far beyond pathetic fallacy, though; if the weather likes to show us that nature is much more powerful than we are.  That our little lives are really quite insignificant, next to the power of an ocean or a gale.  Next to the violence of a storm, our frustrations or annoyances are feeble.  Compared to the vivid blaze of a summer sunset, our limited passions grow pale.

 

Living a mile from the sea, taking notice of the weather properly, I’ve learned that everything passes, although I don’t always remember to remind myself of that.  The squall driven in on a westerly gale will move on further east.  The wind that rattled hailstones on the bedroom window, interrupting a night’s sleep, will die down in the end.  Another night, it will be so still that you’ll fall asleep half-hearing the waves crashing onto the beach, in the otherwise silent darkness.  Things change.  Life, like the weather, is transient.  We’re not locked down into any season, permanently: just as the rain, hail and gales of autumn get you down, you get that one, perfect, crisp and frosty week.  As the January blues hit, you realise the evenings are becoming that tiny bit brighter.  When you think it’s going to be freezing forever, you get what TS Eliot called the ‘midwinter spring’.  No weather app will tell you that, no matter how good its graphics are…

 

It’s just after 3pm as I’m writing this.  The rain has eased a little, but it’s dark and cold and there’s a strong hint of foreboding.  The local surf schools and rescue organisations have urged people to stay out of the water until the waves calm down.  Only a few very dedicated dog-walkers are out.  Most of us are locking ourselves down with the Sunday rituals of newspapers, coffee, and preparing for the week.  The forecast is grim: both on the weather apps and on the news bulletins about Covid-19.  To borrow a favourite line from The Tempest, ‘This isle is full of noises…’

 

But all noise grows silent eventually.  And then the sea calms, the gale blows itself out, the sky clears.  We take our cue from the conditions around us: not just in reaching for an umbrella or a coat, but in how we think and feel.  Storms. Blizzards.  The ice that makes you nervous on the roads.  The perfect summer afternoon you wish would last forever.  The grey banality of a rainy Monday.

 

No matter what’s going on, it will all pass.  And maybe, after all, things will turn out all right in the end.