Fear of Cold

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I've often thought of a line from Richard Adams' "Watership Down," during the winter. Adams says, to paraphrase, that many people who claim to enjoy winter are wrong. What they enjoy is the feeling of being protected against it. I've often thought about that line when walking around on days where every inhaled breath freezes the hairs inside my nose. There is a great satisfaction in staring the cold in the face, feeling its fingertips reach out, and turning back to a well heated home. It's important to remember how easy it is for that final step to fail.

The cold story that has most stuck with me is probably "The Little Match Girl" by Hans Christian Andersen. It is about a girl freezing to death while hallucinating from her matches' fumes which she lights to stay warm. It's utterly terrifying.

Jacob: “True frigophobia, or cryophobia, fear of the cold, is relatively rare.” Also Jacob: LET’S FIX THAT

During the Texas freeze I was living with my partner at his mom's house about 15 minutes from my parents. Each house intermittently had power so we were driving back and forth to bring food and supplies to each other. A pipe burst in my parents house and my brother slipped on the wet tile dislocating his shoulder. He was at the packed ER all night waiting for treatment, so i drove some hot food up to my parents who had to wait in the car outside due to covid restrictions. Driving back, it was late at night and the power was out everywhere for miles leading to my parent's house and in most of the city. Not a single street light, home or business with light. Everything was absolute pitch black like it was deep into the middle of nowhere and i could only see as far as my weak headlights shone. I remember thiking just how chilling it felt to drive down this familiar road that was so deathly still, silent and dark. I felt like I was in a horror game.

"The monster might kill them, but the cold will" What a good line.

“He feels his nose begin to freeze, although this doesn’t bother him too much.” A professor last year explained me that the brain doesn’t register the same pain/cold/hot from your skin after a while that you’ve been feeling it. The brain almost “filter” it because it isn’t something that you can apparently avoid and the body already told you that you’re in danger. She even told the class that she almost lost her nose once because she didn’t cover it in her scarf and hat and etc. while in a very cold place (maybe Siberia…?) and she didn’t even realise it until she got into an house and someone told her that the nose was getting black- she was laughing and we were horrified.

"Cold itself, in terms of physics, is defined by absence". This makes cold somehow...Poetic. Like something tragic, but also beautiful, in a very special way. It's like...The quiet, the loneliness, the silence...The stilness. Almost like the real concept of "Nothing", but yet still, there is something. Just found this channel today and it's just incredible and beautiful. Thanks.

I used to love the cold…until I actually had to work outside during winter. And all that talk of the cold sneaking up on you is right. Hot weather is instantly uncomfortable the moment you open the door. But with the cold if you layer up enough you feel like you can take on Lady Winter herself. Until some hours pass and you realize it hurts to move your fingers under your gloves and there’s an uncontrollable shiver in your chest that thumps like a second heartbeat. I still like the cold but it’s kinda like getting hurt by a friend. You never forget it.

This is fascinating to me as a Vietnamese and an Australian. I have never known temperatures colder than maybe five degrees celsius. In my country, cold never kills. In my country and my culture, heat kills. Heat is what makes your local government tell you to check in on your parents; heat is what keeps kids home from school. Heat is what can destroy your health, kill your children, invade your home and make it uninhabitable.

Fun fact: in Alaska where I grew up, fire-building and outdoor survival is a required part of the school curriculum. We're taught "To Build A Fire" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" in schools when we're around 10-11, partly as literature but mostly as survival ed. I remember going through it in class, identifying with the teacher signs of hypothermia, considering where the speaker made mistakes, etc. Eventually it ends with a full semester-long unit on "not dying when you go outside" that caps off with a weekend-long spring trip to the mountains where we're tested on survival skills, with a second trip in 8th grade during the winter that includes ice fishing and starting our own winter fires for real. If the cold is a big part of your life, you treat it with respect...or you die. If you haven't watched it, I recommed the first season of The Terror (AMC). It's based on a real doomed polar expedition in the 1840s--back when a trip to the Arctic felt like a trip to Mars. Stylistically/thematically it's close cousins with The Thing: there's a monster, but what really dooms the men is the cold and lack of resources.

The freeze in Texas was a really interesting thing to bring up! My neighborhood lost power several times and we had no running water for 6 days. One of my friends lives in an older house, and they barely even had insulation in their walls. I remember one story in particular of an old man who died alone in his house, in his bed, buried in blankets. It just seems like such an awful way to go.

when i was a kid, i was obsessed with the titanic (and i admittedly still am), and one of the most terrifying aspects of its sinking to me was the absolute hopelessness of the people in the water. it was so agonizingly cold, and every single person who froze to death that night knew that they would succumb to it. they listened as the screams around them grew fewer and far between. their last moments were spent surrounded by others but at the same time so isolated, with nothing that could save them from a slow, excruciating death.

“The cold will find the weakness in infrastructure” Very accurate.

Reading through "To Build a Fire" made me think of how much the author, and the man, focused on sanity. Above all else, our greatest weapon against the cold is staying calm and outthinking it. Years ago my father was on a canoeing trip through water that was nearly freezing, and at one point or another his boat partner managed to fall in. Instantly he panicked and screamed for my father to help him, while my dad calmly looked at him and said "stand up." His friend continued to panic until my father finally grabbed the collar of his shirt and said "Stand. Up." His friend finally calmed and realized he was in only about two feet of water, and yet the cold had taken away any sense of rationality, and the only thing truly endangering him was his panic.

Exposure, the war poem is the one that stuck with me. I am autistic, and in my case this comes with a drastically decreased sensitivity to several sensations, particularly pain, hunger and cold, and as a result of this I have experienced hypothermia and frostbite more than most people have had to nowadays- simply due to the fact that I do not notice when things are bad enough that countermeasures must be taken. As a child I did so much dumb shit because I didn't realise it was dangerous; I would go swimming in the Atlantic ocean fully clothed with no towel nor change of clothing nor even a jumper, and some of my fondest memories are from those times splashing around when it was too cold for anyone else to risk it, the solitude of swimming and exploring alone appealed greatly to me, likely also due in part to that same mental difference. The number of times I was declared potentially lost at sea, searched out by the authorities in a desperate attempt to save me from my own stupidity is absurd, though through no fault of my poor parents who tried their absolute level best to keep me from running off (I was a leash child, unsurprisingly). The paramedics knew me by name, and had my parents contacts readily available, and the local police weren't fond of me to put it lightly. The most prominent thing I associate with the cold is that dangerously blissful point in which the discomfort seeps away and it become so easy to slip into the soft, liquid heat you now believe is your reality. It feels like a warm bath after a chilly day, like a hot water bottle on a winter's night only all-encompassing, and it's even easier to succumb to once your hesd stops working. You feel dizzy, and warm, and the closest comparison for me is being pleasantly drunk surrounded by good company. It's deceptive, and you don't realise the danger until you're falling over, passing in and out of consciousness and incapable of basic problem solving. You can no longer accurately answer 2+2, you can't remember what a noun is. It's insidious, and until you realise how far you've slipped you don't even feel afraid. Once you do, it is terrifying.

I've only watched two-ish minutes of this video so far but the "scariest short story without it being in the horror genre" is so real. I read this one story at fifteen, maybe sixteen, called "to kill a child" and it has not left me since.

As someone who grew up in Alaska, the line "the cold does not forgive mistakes" is so exceptionally true. The cold is something you have to respect. Housing is a human right.

Hyped for Fear of Heat, in which prestigious essayist Jacob Geller recounts how he got a slight burn on his finger from a hot pan once, naturally leading to an hour-long existential exploration of humanity's relationship with heat, featuring 9 different literary sources that vividly describe the feeling of flesh crisping or melting off. Oh, and Global Warming. It always comes back to Global Warming.

I can vividly remember the day in 03 when my 3rd grade teacher told us we were going to read the short story “to build a fire” and a few of us including me took turns reading some paragraphs and I vividly remember how after we finished the story, I was absolutely infatuated and obsessed with this story. It never scared me, I just absolutely loved it the second I’ve heard it. The story about a man trekking through the Yukon Territory with his dog through the day and night and as my little 3rd grade mine read it, I could just picture the beautiful Yukon/ Alaskan wilderness with snow covering the ground and trees and the lakes he comes across and the mountains. It was man vs wild and to this day, still my all time absolute favorite story. Jack London has made banger after banger.