Samuel Johnson famously remarked, ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know.’ Virginia Woolf politely added that Englishwomen also talk about the weather but thought there should be strict rules attached to all such discussions. A hostess or a novelist might talk about the weather to settle a guest or a reader, but they should move swiftly on to more interesting themes. A novel that considers nothing but the weather was most probably written by Arnold Bennett (I paraphrase). Mark Twain took this further, promising in the opening of The American Claimant that ‘no weather will be found in this book’ as ‘it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author’.
Yet we cannot escape the weather and people constantly write and speak about it, defying Twain and Woolf. This pandemic is like the weather, an implacable force that we can’t avoid; it’s abysmal, and the weather can be abysmal as well. Certainly it’s plotless, despite our best efforts, and this emerges in both the form and the content of this excellent anthology. The editors, Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan, note that ‘weather … is all mutability and vicissitude’ and has an ‘immediate and disturbing effect on the imagination’. It is also ‘what we stand to lose’: ‘If the Anthropocene is us, and is upon us, we are being orphaned by it on a scale that has no measure.’ Their collection is structured as a series of interruptions, each excerpt ‘summoning up the weather of the next’ to create a notional ‘omniform day’. Names of authors and titles appear only at the base of each page or at the end of the book, so the texts are all ‘exposed to each other’. The title is taken from Woolf (encore), who – confined to bed and watching the sky beyond her window – found herself mesmerised by ‘this incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting of clouds together … One should not let this gigantic cinema play perpetually to an empty house.’
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