üThe lowest pressure appeared over the Atlantic Ocean. “This is the beginning of the “Unqualified People”. I can shamelessly borrow Mushir’s Incipit to start the “abnormal” chapter, especially because one of the characters is called Missel (Victor), who is far from Mushy. Er (Robert) is not far away…
Literature provides a meteoric start to many novels. My favorite is Gustave Flaubert and this “desolate” Boulevard of Bourdon, his two characters Bovard and Pécuchet are exposed at 33 The temperature is in degrees Celsius. Writers like meteorology. When they expose their characters to a certain humidity and pressure in the first sentence, it is not just for simple narrative reasons. Because the color of the sky tells the reader something, because “this kind of weather” is a natural metaphor (again) of the atmosphere from the beginning.
“Odyssey” or “Moby Dick” is also inseparable from the anger of the elements. The storm is always fruitful for literature. This is the real imagination of the journey, the greatest danger for those who dare to leave the village. This is a terrible moment when you are alone and helpless. Yes: After reading a large number of works by the impressive author and pilot Romain Gary, I also want to describe cumulonimbus clouds, create my own “lower Atlantic”, tell stories about airplanes and hurricanes.
Desire to “know the sky”
In the novel, the storm is of course the exact opposite of true horror, because its most important thing is to spare the reader who sits comfortably in the armchair.if Roland Bart Jules Verne cites this kind of “shared limited happiness”, this kind of imagination to explore the limit through travel, this kind of childhood dream, he takes the “near-perfect” novel “Mysterious Island” as an example. This “child of a man (or woman)”, the reader can tell the story once again, “reshape the world, fill it, surround it, and integrate oneself into it (…), while outside the storm, That is, infinite, raging unscrupulously”.
But this is not all. I have always liked etymology and I am glad that the word meteorology comes from the ancient Greek μετέωρος (meaning in the air) and λογος (knowledge). Therefore, “know the sky” can predict what will happen tomorrow. Because people have always wanted to foresee, and undoubtedly also for rule. And the weather is undoubtedly the first thing he must foresee in order to sow and harvest, and also to start a war.
Of course, in order to predict, we must learn from past experience and deal with these facts. We are now using more and more computer simulations. Through the Destination Earth project, Europe is trying to create a virtual climate earth, a digital twin planet, in order to be able to portray weather recognition-driven experiments within a decade. But meteorology is not climate.
If you start a fire at the bottom of the pot and throw a cork into it, after a few seconds you don’t know where the cork will be; but it can be said that the water will boil within a minute. Similarly, the future climate can be predicted and deduced. Unfortunately, waiting for the fate of our civilization is inevitable. But the weather next month will remain chaotic and random for a long time to come. However, if the Admiral of Philip II of Spain were equipped with our instruments, his squadron would not have to return, and he would certainly speak Spanish in London today as he would in New York. The language on which we live is largely due to clouds, rain and wind.
What literature owes the weather
Literature also owes them a lot. On April 5, 1815, Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. He vomited a huge amount of dust into the air, and it was pitch black for several days. In parts of North America and Europe, the temperature dropped by more than ten degrees Celsius. Tolstoy described a beautiful oat field in “War and Peace”, on which a camp was built, and the soldiers were mowing the grass, apparently for feed. The next year, another “year without summer”, the future Mary Shelley and her half-sister Claire Claremont and her lover Percy Shelley lived together in Lord Byron’s lease on the shores of Lake Geneva. In the villa, a stormy night in July shaped the history of literature: “We all write ghost stories.”
I remember fondly that Frankenstein was born in this way, in the whirlpool of a storm that wiped out the summer sun.
Romy and Jürgen Ritte are from French.
