Snow, seven ways
Seven writers, one weather. The snow is first seen, then only heard, then parted in, shared with strangers, weighed south against north, chosen by a single flake, and at last walked through, from a Tang river to the far north of a fairy tale.
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Step 1: 江雪 River Snow
孤舟簑笠翁，獨釣寒江雪。One boat, one old man in a straw cape and hat, / fishing alone in the cold river snow.
Twenty characters take away the birds, then the footprints, until one old man is left fishing in the cold: the stillest snow in the library, and a silence to carry indoors to the next poem.
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Step 2: 夜雪 Night Snow
夜深知雪重，時聞折竹聲。Deep in the night I know the snow is heavy: / now and then I hear the bamboo snap.
Bai Juyi never sees this snow: he feels the cold quilt, notices the window turning bright and hears the bamboo snap under its weight; out on the frontier, Cen Shen’s snow arrives with a gale.
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Step 3: 白雪歌送武判官歸京 Song of White Snow, Seeing Off Secretary Wu on His Return to the Capital
忽如一夜春風來，千樹萬樹梨花開。As if overnight a spring wind had come, / and on a thousand trees, ten thousand trees, the pear blossom opened.
Cen Shen turns a blizzard in the eighth month into pear blossom on ten thousand trees, then watches the road until nothing of his friend is left but hoofprints in the snow; nearly nine centuries later, on West Lake, someone goes out into the snow on purpose.
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Step 4: 湖心亭看雪 Watching the Snow from the Mid-Lake Pavilion
湖上影子，惟長堤一痕，湖心亭一點，與余舟一芥，舟中人兩三粒而已。The only shadows on the lake were a single stroke, the long causeway; a single dot, the mid-lake pavilion; my boat, a mustard seed; and the people in it, two or three grains.
After three days of snow Zhang Dai rows out alone and sees the lake reduced to a stroke, a dot and a mustard seed, then finds two strangers already there, warming wine; his is the soft snow south of the Yangzi, which Lu Xun is about to set against the snow of the north.
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Step 5: 雪 Snow
在無邊的曠野上，在凜冽的天宇下，閃閃地旋轉升騰着的是雨的精魂……On the boundless wilderness, under the frozen vault of heaven, what glitters as it whirls and rises is the spirit of the rain ...
Children pat the moist southern snow into a snow arhat that slowly loses its rouge, while the dry northern snow never clings and rises in the wind like mist around a flame; Xu Zhimo’s snowflake has already decided where it is going.
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Step 6: 雪花的快樂 The Joy of a Snowflake
假如我是一朵雪花，翩翩的在半空裏瀟灑，我一定認清我的方向——If I were a snowflake drifting freely in mid-air, I would know my direction.
A snowflake that refuses the cold valley and the empty street because it knows its direction, and whose melting is an arrival rather than a loss: the gladdest snow on these shelves, and good company on the way into the longest.
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Step 7: The Snow Queen: A Tale in Seven Stories
And they both sat there, grown up, yet children at heart; and it was summer,—warm, beautiful summer.
The longest snow here has the warmest ending: Kay sits in the Snow Queen’s hall trying to spell Eternity in ice, and only after Gerda’s tears have thawed him do the pieces lie down and form the word by themselves.