Each year, the CBC, in conjunction with the House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto, hosts the Massey Lecture, a series of lectures given by an expert guest speaker on their original research. In honour of the 50th anniversary of the lecture, CBC invited Montreal native—and staff writer for the New Yorker—Adam Gopnik to speak on a subject that is inherently Canadian: winter.
The Montreal portion of the lecture was co-hosted by McGill and introduced by Provost Anthony Masi. He spoke of the compatibility between the series and McGill’s goals of pedagogy and community service.
“For half a century, the Massey Lectures have advanced these goals by serving as a forum to engage Candians that stimulates reflection, discussion, and debate,” Masi said. “I would call [the series] a Canadian icon, but that might not be appropriate, since its lecturers are so often iconoclasts.”
Presented in a series of lectures that will eventually become a radio series, Gopnik’s treatise on winter is also available in book form. Winter: Five Windows on the Season offers a vista into the season’s historical and cultural relevance. As its name suggests, Gopnik has broken up the lecture and his treatise on winter into five sections, and will be traveling across Canada to deliver his discussion on each in a different city. The first section, on romantic winter, was delivered last Wednesday at the Telus theater. Romantic winter looks at the season’s transformation in European and Canadian cultural discourse.
Gopnik appreciated that the lecture took place in Montreal, the city where he spent his formative years after moving from Philadelphia. It was here that he experienced his first Canadian snowstorm in 1968.
“In the course of a lifetime, we get to live in a lot of places, if we’re very lucky, as I have been … but there’s only one place in life that we live that we can never get over … and Montreal is the place that I can never get over. I walk the streets and I remember,” he said. “But I remember everything, somehow, that happened: when you’re small and young in a place you’re remembering you; as you get older … the you and the place mix together; and I remember even my first snowstorm as if it were yesterday, although it was in fact Nov. 12, 1968.”
Gopnik’s lectured on the transformation of the conception of winter in European culture, then Canadian culture, to the modern understanding of winter that Canadians now hold. He noted that we encounter a lot of natural metaphors, and that it makes a lot of sense that winter and loss are equated. His lecture then followed the evolution of winter from something awful, bleak, and grey, to something beautiful—almost mystical—and the role that the progression of time has played in the season’s conception. The romance of winter is now possible, as it was for him the morning of the snowstorm: technology and the modern era allow us to appreciate winter from behind one of our five windows.
The lecture was well-received by the audience, and many lined up afterwards for a chance to speak with Mr. Gopnik and have him sign their copies of the book.
“He really engaged my sense of romanticism,” Genvieve Aboud, a teacher at the Champlain College Cégép in Montreal, said. “Then he countered that with the realism, with what we live every year: walking through the slush … I think it was really neat the way he balanced the two ideas.”
“I wouldn’t have immediately thought of Adam Gopnik for the 50th anniversary lecture,” Bethany Or, another teacher at the Cégép, said. “He writes for the New Yorker, and I know that he lived in Paris … but it was perfect and he obviously put a lot of thought into it.”
The lecture will air on CBC Radio 1 Ideas at 9 p.m. on the week of Nov. 7. Gopnik will speak next in Edmonton on Friday Oct. 21.
