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Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a short story discussion

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Chris OConnor

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Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a short story discussion

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Silent Snow, Secret Snow
By Conrad Aiken
Suggested by DWill. Thanks DWill!

Please join us in reading and discussing another great short story!

As always this short story is available 100% FREE online.

Here it is in the form of a short movie.

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Chris OConnor

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Re: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a discussion

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Who plans to read and participate in this discussion?
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a discussion

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Sn ... pretations says
The story tells of a normal boy's descent into a dream world of snow that he finds preferable to the "dirty", mundane world.[2] The story can also be thought of as a Symbolist rejection of reality.[3] The progressive withdrawal from reality and social relationships, as well as preoccupation with idiosyncratically meaningful ideas could be interpreted as characteristic of schizophrenia.
I thought the boy seemed deaf or autistic. His snow fantasy provides a comforting clean safe quiet world, and it is not clear if he is deliberately making it up as a fantasy or actually hearing something.

The title reminded me of the Christmas carol Silent Night Holy Night

Do you know anyone who has retreated from reality into fantasy?
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Re: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a discussion

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Okay. I just finished reading this story. Haven't watched the video but I read the story through one time.

I've never participated in a story discussion here before, don't know how it works, but I can type out a few thoughts and observations.

First of all, the postman and the absence of the sound of footsteps made me wonder if Aiken hadn't lifted some ideas from James M. Cain. Cain wrote the potboilers The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. The main character in the latter can't hear his footsteps at one point, and he suspects that he'll get caught for the murder he's just committed. Anyway, I looked at publication dates and Aiken's story was published in 1934. So was Postman, but Double Indemnity came out in 1936, so Aiken didn't crib from Cain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M._Cain

I used to have a book of poetry by Aiken so I expected the prose to be very lyrical, and it is. Beautiful writing.

A story about a kid going insane. I'd have to read it a couple of more times to look for clues as the cause of the insanity, but the biggest clue would have to be the long excerpt the boy reads from the book. It's an excerpt from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. Oedipal complex, problem with the mother at the end, maybe that's what Aiken was getting at. Or not. Maybe he intended to communicate something else altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_at_Colonus

At any rate, I enjoyed the story and will look for Aikens' Collected stories.
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Re: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a discussion

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KindaSkolarly,
I've never participated in a story discussion here before, don't know how it works, but I can type out a few thoughts and observations.
That's all there is to it. Just read the story and share your thoughts. I've yet to read this story so I'll be back...
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Re: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a discussion

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I saw this on "Night Gallery" starring Radames Pera as the boy and narrated by Orson Welles.

It's about a boy who retreats into his own inner world and shuts everyone else out. But it's a cold, sterile world devoid of anything but him and the snow, the purpose of which is to bury and obliterate the outside world.
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Re: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a discussion

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I think of this story as a tour de force, Conrad Aiken showing us in precise and elaborate detail the disappearance of young Paul Haselman from the world that everyone else inhabits. Geo said the story is one included in an anthology of horror tales, and that seems appropriate, but it's a most unusual horror story, taking place entirely in the mind and using few of the normal props of that genre. There is, though, the mention of "menace" in the approaching blizzard that will obliterate the boy, and this menace blends with the seductiveness of the snow and its hissing voices. The menace seems to imply that Paul is in the grip of a sinister force that lures him into its power with visions of indescribable beauty and the promise of escape from a fallen world of mere physicality and sense perception. We would say that Paul has become severely mentally ill, but to himself he has become an exalted being reaching a mental place far above that of the people he is coming to despise, like his parents, who would try to pull him back to their pointless existence. The story almost reads like a cautionary fable on the dangers of mystical experience.

I think that in the very beginning, Paul has lost contact with reality and that not even the progression of the postman is real. He is not hearing his steps from way up the road, probably imagining the knocks on the door as well.

The horror in the story is that felt by the parents, conventional people who are witnessing their brilliant, promising son become taken over by demons, as they would see it.
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Re: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a discussion

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DWill wrote:"menace" in the approaching blizzard that will obliterate the boy blends with the seductiveness of the snow and its hissing voices. The menace seems to imply that Paul is in the grip of a sinister force that lures him into its power with visions of indescribable beauty and the promise of escape from a fallen world of mere physicality and sense perception.
Seeing it like that reminds me of the story of the Sirens in the Odyssey by Homer: “Come this way, honored Odysseus, great glory of the Achaians, and stay your ship, so that you can listen here to our singing; for no one else has ever sailed past this place in his black ship until he has listened to the honey-sweet voice that issues from our lips.” Paul hears the snow like a siren song, a tempting lure that will lead him to destruction. The main difference is that I did not read the snow as having any agency, since it is just a passive dream in Paul’s head.
DWill wrote: We would say that Paul has become severely mentally ill, but to himself he has become an exalted being reaching a mental place far above that of the people he is coming to despise, like his parents, who would try to pull him back to their pointless existence. The story almost reads like a cautionary fable on the dangers of mystical experience.
Yes, it is a mental illness, except that milder forms of such escapism are common, so readers may well be able to identify with Paul. Watching television or using recreational drugs and alcohol are examples of things people do which can expand to interfere with real life.
DWill wrote: The horror in the story is that felt by the parents, conventional people who are witnessing their brilliant, promising son become taken over by demons, as they would see it.
Yes, and your demon analogy suggests the psychologist as exorcist. But I am having trouble seeing this story as horrifying. It is a psychological portrait of descent into a comforting isolated fantasy world, and not exactly a tale of suspense or surprise. For it to be horrifying there would need to be some suggestion that an external power was manipulating the snow dream, with some possibility of it proving deadly and spreading to other people.
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Re: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a discussion

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Seeing it like that reminds me of the story of the Sirens in the Odyssey by Homer: “Come this way, honored Odysseus, great glory of the Achaians, and stay your ship, so that you can listen here to our singing; for no one else has ever sailed past this place in his black ship until he has listened to the honey-sweet voice that issues from our lips.” Paul hears the snow like a siren song, a tempting lure that will lead him to destruction. The main difference is that I did not read the snow as having any agency, since it is just a passive dream in Paul’s head.
That's a great parallel you point out. Odysseus or his men were confronted a couple of times with the temptation to just bliss out, forget about all of this striving. It is also remarkable that the large brain capacity of humans brings with it more potential for dysfunction than we assume is the case with other animals.
Yes, it is a mental illness, except that milder forms of such escapism are common, so readers may well be able to identify with Paul. Watching television or using recreational drugs and alcohol are examples of things people do which can expand to interfere with real life.
I have a perhaps curmudgeonly fear of the narcotic effect of young people being tethered to what we call "electronic devices."
Yes, and your demon analogy suggests the psychologist as exorcist. But I am having trouble seeing this story as horrifying. It is a psychological portrait of descent into a comforting isolated fantasy world, and not exactly a tale of suspense or surprise. For it to be horrifying there would need to be some suggestion that an external power was manipulating the snow dream, with some possibility of it proving deadly and spreading to other people.
I think if we envision the snow in the way Aiken describes it, filling up the space in Paul's brain as it fills up space in his hallucinated environment, the snow loses the mainly benign quality it has for us and becomes an instrument of insidious terror. The apocalypse that happens in the end is pretty frightening despite its confinement to one person's mind and its mysterious origin. This is not the tone of Poe or Lovecraft. For me, the understatement works a bit more effectively than the rhetorical flourishes often employed in horror stories. I think of the biggest offender being Shelley's Frankenstein, in which the author actually blunts the terror with her statements of how horrifying the monster is, not to mention the whole sentimental overlay that pads out the novel. She should not have expanded the story beyond the original tale she wrote, in my opinion.
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Re: Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken - a discussion

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DWill wrote:Odysseus or his men were confronted a couple of times with the temptation to just bliss out, forget about all of this striving.
Indeed, to wit: “My men went on and presently met the Lotus-Eaters, nor did these Lotus-Eaters have any thoughts of destroying our companions, but they only gave them lotus to taste of. But any of them who ate the honey-sweet fruit of lotus was unwilling to take any message back, or to go away, but they wanted to stay there with the lotus-eating people, feeding on lotus, and forget the way home." (9.91-97)
This illustrates that bliss is a two edged sword, an experience of ecstatic joy that is morally corrupted, destroying the discipline and temperance needed for success in life.
DWill wrote: the large brain capacity of humans brings with it more potential for dysfunction than we assume is the case with other animals.
I have never heard of mental illness in animals – it seems a purely human thing.
DWill wrote: I have a perhaps curmudgeonly fear of the narcotic effect of young people being tethered to what we call "electronic devices."
That is a theme central to The Matrix movie series, which I wrote about in my reviews (1-2 &
3) back in 2004. Those movies were prophetic, given how iPhones have exploded into our society since then, creating a ‘silent snow’ type of effect for addicted users.
DWill wrote: if we envision the snow in the way Aiken describes it, filling up the space in Paul's brain as it fills up space in his hallucinated environment, the snow loses the mainly benign quality it has for us and becomes an instrument of insidious terror.
And yet it still does not pose a wider threat like a zombie virus, so the emotion is more pity than fear.
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