Winter's Miracles Of Beauty | Saturday Evening Post

Subscribe Online | E-mail Newsletter | Museum Gift Shoppe




	Departments


		Health / Fitness
		Food / Recipes
		Books / Reviews
		Opinion / Letters
		Features
		Humor / Cartoons
		Activities / Games
		Post Illustrators
		All Departments




	Topics


		Alzeimers
		Arthritis
		Bipolar Disorder
		Diabetes
		Eye Health
		Heart Health
		All Topics




	Magazine




		Current Issue
		Subscribe Online
		Magazine Extras




	Resources


		E-mail Newsletter
		RSS Feeds
		Disclaimer
		Site Map

Winter's Miracles Of Beauty

A Vermont dairy farmer saw something in snowflakes which other men failed to see

By Kay Redfield Jamison, Dr.

From the November/December 2005 Issue

EDITOR'S NOTE: Genius has many guises. In the case of Wilson Bentley, born on a Vermont farm 140 years ago this year, genius took the form of a magnificent obsession, an all-absorbing life-long passion to record the exquisite anatomy of snow crystals and preserve them for posterity. In her recent book, Exuberance: The Passion for Life, renowned psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison argues that exuberance such as Bentley's is a key element in fostering our most important creative and scientific achievements. The following is her vivid account of Wilson Bentley's amazing life and accomplishments.

It is a rare person who remains unmoved by a first snowfall. Snow is magic: it draws us in, jostles memory, and stirs desire. It enchants. For Snowflake Bentley, snow cast a lifelong spell. Like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, whose contemporary he was, Bentley was incapable of indifference to the world around him. When there was a winter storm and snow was flying, he was in the fields or hills; he could not stay indoors. His delight in snow made him an astute observer of it; it then made him an infectiously enthusiastic guide. Exuberance gave him passion, stamina, and a lasting voice to speak out for small beauties.

Wilson Bentley was born on a Vermont farm in 1865, just as the Civil War was ending. He was captivated by the beauty of snow crystals even when very young, and managed to persuade his parents to buy him a camera and microscope. By the age of 19, he had taken the very first photomicrograph of a snow crystal. He was irretrievably smitten. "Amazed and thrilled at their matchless loveliness," Bentley wrote many years later, "the work soon became so all-absorbing that I have continued it with undiminished enthusiasm all these years. No words can convey the least idea of the intense enjoyment, the almost countless thrills, these winter studies have afforded me." Unlike John Muir, who went from the exploration of the vast wilderness lands to the apprehension of self, Bentley went from the study of the infinitesimal to contemplation of the grand: "The deeper one enters into the study of Nature," he believed, "the further one ventures into and along the by-paths that, like a mystic maze, thread Nature's realm in every direction, the broader and grander becomes the vista opened up to the view."

Bentley could not remember a time when he did not love the snow. Always, from the beginning, he said, "it was the snowflakes that fascinated me most." From the first snowfall to the last, he was supremely happy. Passionate about snowflakes, he devoted his life to their study and preservation.

"I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty," he once said to an interviewer. "It seems a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated." He was as stricken by their impermanence as struck by their beauty: "When a snowflake melted." he lamented, "that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind." One snowstorm brought him the most exquisite crystal he had seen to date, "a wonderful little splinter of ice, incredibly fragile," but despite his care the crystal was broken while transferring it to a slide. Even after many years had passed he was to declare the loss of the snow crystal "a tragedy," and only with effort would he be able to hold back his tears.

Bentley was insistent upon saving his "snow blossoms" for the rest of the world; he was possessed, he said, by a "great desire to show people something of this wonderful loveliness, an ambition to become, in some measure, its preserver." Just as Muir and Roosevelt could not feel as they did about the American wilderness and not do everything within their powers to save it, so too Bentley looked at snowflakes, loved them, and then did all he could do to preserve their beauty. Snow crystals existed for a reason, he was convinced: "Perhaps they come to us not only to reveal the wonderous beauty of the minute in Creation but to teach us that all earthly beauty is transient and must soon fade away.

But though the beauty of the snow is evanescent … it fades but to come again." (Thoreau, who died only a few years before Bentley was born, also had a near-mystical response to snowflakes: "How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated!" he wrote in his journal. "I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand." Nature, he reflected with hope, had "not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart?")

Bentley's calling was to preserve the snow crystals and, once they were preserved, to give their loveliness an exuberant voice. He did the former with a patience that is nearly impossible to imagine, painstakingly taking photographs of more than 5,000 individual crystals during his lifetime. Winter after New England winter he stood in the freezing cold as the snows fell, capturing crystals mid-flight, transferring them to glass plates, and photographing them before they could melt. Later, when he published their delicate images in the journals of science, his exuberance danced across the pages.

Enthusiastic descriptions of the shapes and origins of snow crystals, which bubbled up irrepressibly in his writings, were utterly out of keeping with the more circumspect language of most scientists. Indeed, Bentley's language would be stricken from any modern scientific journal; even a whiff of it would result in withering reviews and raised eyebrows from more measured colleagues. Strong emotion, more often than not, is at cross-purposes with accurate scientific description. Enthusiasm is meant to be kept on a tight rein and love itself on a short lead, although one could argue, as Cyril Connolly did, that he who is too much a master of his passions is reason's slave.

Bentley need not have worried about such enslavement. In one scientific paper, published in 1902, Bentley used the words "beauty" or "beautiful" nearly 40 times in nine pages. The paper was about the atmospheric conditions affecting the size and form of snow crystals, as well as the classification of crystals and their occurrence and distribution in relation to various drifts and types of clouds and temperatures. But Bentley also wrote about the loveliness of the snow crystals whose photographic images he had chosen to include in the paper. They were, he said, "marvelously beautiful objects of nature … the feast of [their] beauty fills these pages." Snow crystals Nos. 716 and 718, he proclaimed, were "very choice trod beautiful," and Nos. 722 and 723 were "charming patterns in snow architecture." He went on, enraptured by what he described as the "gems from God's own laboratory": "No. 785 is so rarely beautiful," he enthused, and No. 781 is "wonderfully beautiful," while the "great beauty of No. 837 will appeal to all lovers of the beautiful." Other crystals were "exquisitely" or "exceptionally beautiful." The snowstorm of February 1902, he gushed, contributed "choice examples of snow crystal architecture, as souvenirs of the skill of the Divine Artist."

Bentley was unable to contain himself, even when making scientific hypotheses. In one scientific paper, he started his speculations about the growth of crystals in a straightforward way: "I assume that the configurations of the exterior portions of the crystals surrounding the nucleus must depend largely upon the initial and subsequent movement, or the flights, downward, or horizontally, of the growing crystals within the clouds," he wrote. The objectivity of his language, to this point, is indistinguishable from that of any other scientist writing in the same journal. He continued for a while in a dispassionate vein: "We must therefore make a careful study and analysis of the interior portions of crystals.… These interior details reveal more or less completely the preexisting forms that the crystals assumed during their youth in cloudland."

But then Bentley's joy in the beauty of snow crystals breaks through: "Was ever life history written in more dainty or fairy-like hieroglyphics?" he asked. "How charming the task of trying to decipher them." It would be impossible, he concluded, to find the ultimate snowflake, though that would not keep him from ardent pursuit. "It is extremely improbable that anyone has as yet found, or, indeed, ever will find, the one preeminently beautiful and symmetrical snow crystal that nature has probably fashioned when in her most artistic mood."

Duncan Blanchard, an atmospheric scientist who has written the definitive biography of Snowflake Bentley, likens Bentley's search for the "preeminently beautiful snow crystal" to Sir Galahad's for the Holy Grail. This quest, believes Blanchard, "sustained and nourished Bentley with undiminished enthusiasm until his dying day. This was exuberance at its best."

Certainly, 25 years after writing about the "preeminently beautiful" snow crystal, Snowflake Bentley was still enthralled. And still looking. Subsequent winters provided him a wealth of new crystal photographs, and 40 of the new "snow gems," he was sure, could be described as "wonderful" or "masterpieces." Individual crystals, he rhapsodized, had to be seen to be believed. "The beautiful branching one that fell December 9, 1921," with his usual zeal, and No. 4215 was "thrillingly beautiful." He wished that all readers of the journal in which his latest photographs appeared "could see and enjoy the snowflake masterpieces of this winter."

The images of the snow crystals reproduced in the article are indeed beautiful, and Bentley's ebullient portrayals very much make one wish one could have been there during the snowstorms as he captured the crystals falling to earth. Who would not have wanted to be there during the 1927 snowflake season as described by Bentley, especially during the "wonderfully brilliant closing" of one late February day recalled by him? On that date, he exclaimed, "the clouds for a while showered the earth with starry, fernlike gems such as thrill, amaze, and delight snowflake lovers." His delight is contagious.

Bentley is famous for his declaration that no two snowflakes are alike. He and other scientists knew that the infinite varieties of temperature and humidity conditions act together in such a way as to idiosyncratically notch crystals on their downward flight; unless collected at very high altitude before its journey is done, each snow crystal will be unique. This is true even of crystals artificially created in laboratory snow tanks. No two will be alike; each will carry the physical history of its individual travels. A single ice crystal contains some ten sextillion molecules; therefore, "considering all the ways those molecules can be arranged," argues one contemporary scientist, "the odds against any two completely identical snowflakes having fallen since the atmosphere formed some four billion years ago are enormous." Another has stated that "it could snow day and night until the sun dies before two snow crystals would be exactly, precisely alike." This is a marvelous, if unprovable, thought. Snowflake Bentley intuited such singularity and loved it.

Bentley's enthusiasm for snowflakes would be simply a footnote in the annals of enthusiasts and eccentrics were it not for the results of his sustained passion, for it was a passion which allowed him to withstand the chill of both winter and his Vermont neighbors. He endured the inevitable frustrations and failures involved in capturing and photographing a solitary snow crystal before it melted into nothingness because he felt an urgency that others did not. Bentley's temperament and sensibilities impelled him to share beauty with those less exposed to it and to proselytize those who felt less acutely than he. His exuberance brought to millions a loveliness that fell from the skies. He saw, he felt, and he captured a tiny gorgeousness for history. No bit of Nature ever had a better Boswell.

Bentley loved snowflakes above all else, but he also made important contributions to the understanding of other phenomena of nature. He observed and carefully described the date, appearance, and intensities of more than 600 auroras and took meticulous measurements of nearly 350 individual raindrops. He was a pioneer photographer of clouds, frost, and dew, and his work on cloud physics, in the assessment of Blanchard and other atmospheric scientists, was 40 years ahead of its time.

The people in his New England village, however, regarded him as a little cracked. Being Vermont farmers and less than transfixed by snow, they found Bentley's intoxication odd. Why take pictures of snowflakes, they asked, when "you can't sell them and you can't eat them." Fortunately, the American Meteorological Society disagreed and awarded the self-educated dairy farmer its first research grant. His photomicrographs of snow crystals made their way into scientific journals--60 were published in Nature alone--as well as into popular newspapers and magazines, and they influenced naturalists, photographers, scientists, and jewelry designers at Tiffany. There is no equivalent of his photographic collection, nor is it likely that there will ever be one.

When Bentley died in 1931, even his Vermont neighbors had a sense of the importance of his life and passing. "John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing," wrote his hometown newspaper. "Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look."

Nor had they his capacity for joy or exuberant pursuit. "So long as eyes shall see and kindle at the beautiful in Nature," Bentley said, his camera and pen would be there. It was his capacity to be kindled, of course, that set Bentley apart. His urgency and passion ensured that his message would be both seen and heard. The physicist W.J. Humphreys, one of the many eminent scientists who were deeply impressed by his work, wrote the text to accompany Bentley's photographic masterpiece, Snow Crystals. In it, he observed that Bentley had pursued his life's work with the "insistent ardor of the lover and the tireless patience of the scientist," that he had "made it possible for others to share at leisure, and by the comfortable fireside, the joys that hour after hour bound him to his microscope and his camera in an ice cold shed." Bentley brought indoors an otherwise invisible beauty from the skies.

Bentley's was a magnificent obsession, plumb-line true and enduring. Just days before he died, he wrote in his weather notebook for the last time. "Cold west wind afternoon," the entry reads. "Snow flying."

E-mail

Print

Discuss | Text Size:

Highlighted Articles

		New Solution to the organ shortage Is there a simple and better incentive to increase organ donations?
		Roughing It in Africa A behind the scenes look at the safari of a lifetime in a Kenyan game reserve.
		Diabetes: Healthy choices Learn to manage diabetes without sacrificing great taste with savory and healthy soulutions.
		Tiger Woods' turbo swing Efficient use of body physics has made Tiger Woods' drive the most powerful in golf.