Page 81 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

SNOW IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING in the world. A snowflake is a cluster of
crystals, like a diamond, but diamond is one of the hardest materials found on
the planet. Hercules’s helmet, Kronos’s scythe and Prometheus’s chains were
all hewn from diamond. A snowflake, by contrast, is extremely fragile.

There’s nothing more fragile or more beautiful than a snowflake. Like all
creatures, it exists in multiple forms. And so, while the Wild West Show was
touring the world and reaching the peak of its fame, and while the last of the
Indian tribes, now decimated, were being herded into overcrowded reserves,
Wilson Alwyn Bentley was growing up quietly in Jericho, Vermont. As a
teenager he roamed the countryside, climbed the hills and moseyed about
among the maples. He thinks he can read tree bark. As he listens to the

buzzing of flies, he can hear talk. When winter comes, he spends all his time
outside; as soon as he gets in from school, and has eaten a good slice of pie,
he’s off trekking, like all Yankees in Vermont. But he never goes very far, he
slashes along the paths that take him to the immensity of tiny things. His
mother is a schoolteacher. She bought him an old microscope, and every day
he takes it out of its pretty pyramid-base box. He sets it up, slides open the

tray and places a glass-and-bone plate on the flat surface. Very delicately, the
tweezers tear a scrap of snow from the window ledge. It’s there on the plate.
Little Wilson bends over the lens, and he can see. Wilson, the farmer’s son,
the yokel from Vermont, can see. The white stub slowly melts on its glass
plate. Wilson looks as long as he can. He’s fifteen years old.
For five years, he observes everything nature offers him: pine-cone scales,
acorns, leaves, seeds, pebbles, petals, feathers, everything. Wilson wants to

see it all. He’s drawn to anything small, as if the world were more beautiful in
that form, humbler, more delicate, but also more abundant, stranger, and also
vaster, as if there were some kind of sorcery in the imperceptible, and as if
another world, at once minuscule but in reality vast, mind-bogglingly
enormous, were hidden there on a different scale. It makes Wilson feel giddy.

No one snowflake is like another. To begin with, he thought he’d found a
single design; but he was wrong. God has created as many designs as there are
snowflakes. And so as not to lose this marvellous beauty, Wilson draws them.
But the snowflakes disappear. Pfft! He never has time to finish his drawing.
His own breath melts the flakes. It’s as if God wanted to preserve the secret of