The pathetic fallacy, or not the weather we hoped for

It was forty-five years ago, but I still remember as if it were yesterday a pronunciation exercise I was given in language classes as part of my French degree.

It proclaimed that if a Frenchman talks about the weather, that means he’s incapable of talking about anything else. But to be a good Englishman, you have to be able to talk about the weather, whether that’s the weather as it is today, the weather of the past or the weather we might have in the future.

I was reminded of this today by a piece of news Danielle mentioned. She’s a member of several groups of expatriates living in the Valencia region. It seems the associated websites are being inundated by regrets from foreigners who have recently moved here.

Certainly, the weather’s giving us plenty of material for English conversations.

My way home from the shops this morning
The heavens weeping at our sad condition?

“We came for the glorious weather. And it just keeps pourng,” they complain.

To which the locals reply, “we love it! You don’t know what you’re wishing for. We know the heat that’s coming. Enjoy this while you can.”

On the more literary side of my degree course, we also studied the so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’. This is the belief that inanimate objects, even the whole of nature itself, can sometimes reflect human moods or events.

One of the most powerful examples is in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. On the day before the Ides of March, a terrible storm strikes Rome. The character Casca is awestruck by it:

I have seen tempests when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
Th' ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam
To be exalted with the threatening clouds,
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.

Yep. Not quite “A deep depression has moved over the East coast of Italy from the Tyrrhenian Sea, bringing high winds and potentially electric storms to Rome.” 

No, this isn’t meteorology. This is the sauciness of humans (got to love that way of putting it) getting right up the noses of the Gods. And, indeed, Rome’s in for a bad time the next day, the Ides, when Julius Caesar will be assassinated.

Windswept moors, as in Wuthering Heights

There are plenty of other examples. Why, the very title of Wuthering Heights uses the pathetic fallacy: ‘wuthering’ is the howling wind worrying away at the people and the buildings it encounters. Again, in Dickens’ Great Expectations, the protagonist Pip comments on the weather just before things turn a bit hairy:

Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs… Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.

Not exactly “turned a bit blowy and wet”, is it? Not “are we ever going to get a Spring?”, either, or “bet Wimbledon gets washed out”. Rather more intense than the usual comments Englishmen tend to make, however expert they may be at talking about the weather. Also rather more portentous, rather more wrapped up with human events than I generally look for in my weather reports.

Well, with all due respect to Shakespeare, Dickens and Emily Brontë, I always took a bit of a supercilious view of all this kind of stuff. “What, the weather reflects moods on Earth? Pull the other one,” I’d tend to say.

Now, though, I’m less sure. Is it simply a coincidence that the weather’s been atrocious for over five weeks now, which is just as long as the Coronavirus lockdown’s lasted in Spain? As any good conspiracy-theorist would say, I think not.

No. With my apologies to those who moved to Valencia for the lovely weather and have found nothing but disappointment so far, I have to say that you may have been caught up in something much bigger than any of us.

This could be the very heavens weeping over our lack of preparedness for the pandemic. Over our terrible and constraining lockdown. Over the illness and death sweeping the world.

Still. At least you can share the awe. This may be the first time that we’ve ever been privileged to see the pathetic fallacy actually borne out in reality.

Something to remember with pride, I’d say, and rejoice in while it lasts.