"During a blizzard one night, I cheered myself by cutting sheets of white paper into large snowy hedgehog footprints, printing 'Dimmesdale??!!' on some of them.
And I kept seeing a parallel between all this black matter spattering a snowy coastline and ink staining white paper, so the whole thing turned into an allegory for the act of writing.
Here the curtain — a white paper scrim — rises on a snowy Elsinore.
In this paper, the realized niche of the Snowy Plover (Charadrius alexandrinus), a primarily resident Florida shorebird, is described as a function of the scenopoetic and bionomic variables at the nest-, landscape-, and regional-scale.
After reading about the string of murders in the paper, Walt comes down from his snowy hideout furiously angry and ready for vengeance, armed only with his wits.
After they left, Victoria wrapped their purchases in Prada tissue paper, put them inside four large, snowy-white Prada shopping bags, and tied everything together with deep-blue Prada ribbon.
Among the theories floating in local papers was that he stumbled on the snowy surface of the side street, or that the object he dropped was the cellphone found beside his body, a possible trigger for the belt-bomb that he might have accidentally activated on retrieving the phone.
It's characteristic of Bonnefoy that his faithful description of passing through the woods on a snowy evening also gives him the metaphor of a blank piece of paper in the instant before a poem fills it.
Magnified, the edge resembles a snowy mountain range about four thousandths of an inch thick; the snow is paper dust, ready to drift into a printer's jammable gears.
The Oxford scholar Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reminded me that a few unusually snowy winters, coincidental with Dickens's childhood, infused "A Christmas Carol," "The Pickwick Papers" and, ultimately, the modern British psyche with blizzard-laden fantasies out of all proportion to actual precipitation, at least of the frozen kind.
