LA LEZIONE DEL FREDDO

When the snow seems to never end, how does our life change? The daily experience of cold is an extreme adventure we are no more used to and a powerful revelation that might surprise us.

Living the chill. Not running away from it, but training the body, the mind and the hands to understand it. Learning lessons from it: how to find a lost path in the snow, how to build an igloo in the garden, how to leave the dog in the car without letting him freeze, and never - NEVER - use brakes on ice. Thoreau and Hawthorn could become your best friends. When the family first arrive in New Hampshire, the sight is breathtaking: a white house surrounded by the shadows of the woods, with a light blue roof that reminds them of a fairytale. This endless hot summer seems not to have any will to end. But the neighbours appear to be ready for a menacing presence: the snow. When it arrives, everything turns white and icy. The Cold has begun. Bears and wood piles, fires in the chimney and dreamlike cross-country-skiing tracks, heavy footsteps in the snow to mark the way home: these are the ingredients of a memoir that aims to be both a survival guide, and a precious record for the children of the global warming. Roberto Casati is a cognitive science philosopher, and Research Director of CNRS Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the Institut Nicod in Paris. He often features in Sole 24 Ore, and he is currently working with the neurophysiologist Patrick Cavanagh to their The Visual World of Shadows, to be published soon by MIT Press. In 2016 he crossed the Atlantic ocean in a sailing boat, starting the research project "Cognition in the Wind" on low tech sailing.