The coldest days carry the bluest light

In winter, the blues win. Blue in art and literature.

Feb 04, 2026

The sun beams down just for me, I’m certain of it. To keep me afloat from sinking too deep from all of my eternal worries. It works, but only just. Enough to prevent a complete submerge. I skim the surface, my head stubbornly above water, to feel the sun, unfiltered, through the window. It’s deceptive though. The rays streaming in are intense with heat—so much so that I take off an extra layer, but it’s only an illusion from the outside cold.

A week and a half out from the big snowstorm and we’re collectively over this ugly phase of snow. Except it’s been so cold, the snow is not melting. We wake up to 4 degree mornings. There are large drifting ice floes in the East and Hudson Rivers.

I know that’s nothing to you Midwesterners and your daily negative temperatures, but it’s not nothing here in New York. I know because there is so much complaining about the weather on social media. Complaints that the city and the new mayor haven’t done enough to remove old snow from curbs. Complaints about how uncharacteristically cold it’s been this winter. Other New Yorkers clap back with a dismissive eye roll. Tell me you’re a recent NYC transplant without saying you’re a recent NYC transplant. Oh, internet. You’re such a time suck, but also entertaining sometimes.

But both are true. We haven’t seen a winter this cold in more than 15 years. It feels relentless. We don’t need those adorable groundhogs and their shadows to tell us that we’re bearing down on six more weeks of winter because we can feel it in our bones.

Still, I layer up and take walks most days. My investments last November in insulated Sorels with good traction and a long down puffer are paying off in big ways. I leave the apartment wearing three layers, a scarf wrapped around my face, and a hood pulled over my hat. On days when it feels exceptionally frigid or the body extra achy, I shove two hand warmers, the kind you shake to activate the heat, down the front pocket of my pants to protect the most vulnerable organs of my body. I’m walking with nearly every inch covered and look ridiculous, but this is not the time to care about fashion; this is about survival.

The thing I appreciate most about this winter is that the obstructive snow piles are forcing all of us to slow down. It tests the patience of New Yorkers who negotiate with every hurried step, space and time with other strangers on the sidewalk. We’re relegated on some blocks to single file because of narrowly shoveled paths. It’s torture for a city that likes to hustle, but for someone who has the luxury of nowhere I need to be most days, I take the cue and try to appreciate all the little things I would miss if I were hurrying along at my usual pace.

In the park, I search for snow that is still unmarred by a million footsteps. Is there any snow left in this city that hasn’t been trounced by humans? But I only find snow that that has been compacted into a dense frosty crunch that no longer scatters light but absorbs all the warm wavelengths and just returns blue.

In winter, the blues win. Optics and depth of light absorption offer a scientific explanation, but blue is a feeling that transcends both language and science.

Some colors carry more weight than others. Maybe because blue is the color of depth without containment—think vast oceans or the sky—it’s been linked to sadness and melancholy for centuries in artwork and literature. You can’t look at any of the paintings in Picasso’s Blue Period without feeling human fragility and isolation. Elongated and hunched figures, often of society’s most vulnerable, express spiritual emptiness and grief, but with a dignified restraint.

In Sylvia Plath’s bleak poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” the blue light in the first two verses is described as “cold and planetary.” You can feel Plath’s detachment, the conflict between the feminine and masculine, maternal and paternal, and the unbearable weight of hopelessness. The moon, representing her mother in “blue garments” like the virgin Mary, is an emotionally absent figure. Nature and religion fail to provide comfort; the saints in blue, cold and lifeless, reflect back her internal despair:

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

Similarly, in Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, a blue cast seeps in halfway through the film in Part 2, a dramatic shift from the amber lighting in Part 1. As the encroaching blue planet creeps closer to collision, you can feel the warmth drain from the protagonist’s world as she falls deeper into depression. The blue tones are beautiful, but achingly oppressive. The end of the world is not a fiery clash of two planets, but rather of surrender rendered in an icy blue glow.

It is said that sailors would fly blue flags when someone from their crew died at sea. Maybe this is where the phrase “feeling blue” originated, because associating blue with sadness sometimes feels a bit arbitrary to me. When I look at the blue tinged snow or a cloudless sky, I feel calm.

I walk to the pier to see the ice floes for myself. I climb over snow banks glistening with ice crystals to see them up close right by the water’s edge. I’m surprised that it holds the weight of my body when I was expecting to sink down. They glow blue along their frosted edges, and through their thinnest skins I see the ocean’s translucence beneath. I’m mesmerized when they suddenly start undulating with the current. They form a mosaic with their angular shapes and the motion nearly makes me seasick.

The coldest days carry the bluest light. Blue is also the color of longing. I once read somewhere that cold slows time perception for some people. I don’t know if that’s true, but January was only 31 days long, yet it felt like an entire season. Human nature craves a reset and we receive that at the cusp of every new month.

A roundup of interesting links

To read:

The lost joy of the Food Network chef as teacher. TikTok is where the recipes are, but it’s a poor substitute for a TV expert’s instruction. (Salon)
Such a good read. Didn’t fully click for me, the gradual end of TV chefs who actually teach skills towards more short-form algorithmic content, mostly because food content has been entrenched in reels and TikTok for a while now. And I can confirm that most all cooking recipes and inspiration that my kids cite is from these apps.
Minneapolis Residents Wear Their Passports, Desperate to Ward Off ICE (NYTimes gift link)
Is this what we’ve come to? Apparently so. And not to minimize the fear of those currently in the crosshairs, but I too have wondered if I should be carrying my passport.
In the bustle of the city, we need more pockets of serenity (Psyche)
Buildings that “feel like pauses.” “Architectural calm built into the flow of commuters.” Choosing colors with intention. It’s possible to find stillness in cities. I feel that I’m eternally in search of those pockets in NY. And I still think about the Doug Wheeler installation that was referenced in this essay.
Ideas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find (Asterisk)
We aren’t running out of ideas; productivity growth has slowed over the past 50 years because our ideas are failing to convert because of barriers to commercialization and market efficiency.
"It implies we're fighting against some fundamental law of diminishing returns in human creativity. But what we’re actually fighting against is a flaw in our markets that prevents that creativity from being rewarded economically."
Photographer Documents Untouched Children’s Bedrooms Left by School Shootings in Netflix’s ‘All The Empty Rooms’ (Peta Pixel)
Unimaginable heartbreak. Eight bedrooms of children gone.
AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it’s getting weird fast (Ars Technica)
Have you heard about this? A social media site just for AI agents called Moltbook? Humans can lurk and observe the behavior of 32,000 agents. And yes, they are talking about us.
Glossary of Moira Rose
I was saddened to hear of Catherine O’Hara’s passing. Suddenly felt an urge to draw her as one of my favorite TV characters, ever. Some of my favorite Moira Rose words: Bombilating. Habilmented. Peregrination. Pettifogging. Thinking that we needed a Moira Rose dictionary, I sort of found one.

To watch:

Wenting Zhu Cultivates a Kaleidoscopic Garden of Crystals in 100+ Petri Dishes (This is Colossal)
I’ve long been fascinated in bioart and have dabbled a little bit in it myself. To see the growth in motion, however, is like watching miniature worlds blossom.
Wenting Zhu writes about the project: “Garden serves as a metaphor for the meeting of the natural and the man-made. A garden is a space where nature and human intention intertwine: neither wholly wild nor entirely artificial.”