Exuberance: The Passion for Life by Kay Redfield Jamison Read Free Book Online

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 writtenthe definitive biography of Snowflake Bentley, likens Bentley’s search for the “preeminently beautiful snow crystal” toSir 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, twenty-five 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 forty 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, No. 399, is a masterpiece of crystal architecture,” he exclaimed 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