Cold doesn’t exist. There is no such thing.
What we think of as cold, really, is simply the absence of heat. While heat is real, it’s a measurable form of energy, cold is not. Cold is actually nothing.
Perhaps this is why cold is so hauntingly beautiful. The frigid depths of the Taiga forest, or the outer reaches of black space, or the little village in Wisconsin where I live — these places seem to challenge our very existence. They seem like things that should exist only in poetic Norse or Greek mythologies, in which deities embody both human traits and the most fundamental elements, like light and dark, hot and cold, chaos and order, life and oblivion.
This is not silly pseudo-philosophy or wordplay; it’s hard science. I learned it a week ago, after having lived on this planet and believed in the existence of cold for thirty-nine years.
This is the year I turn forty, and it makes me happy that I’m still learning new things. And by learning new things, I guess I really mean learning that the things I thought I knew were completely incorrect; that the gods in which I previously believed are no longer real, and I’m eager to meet their usurpers.
Because if cold, which is one of the very first things we experience and think we understand in our lives, as we writhe closer to the meaty conduction of our parents’ bodies, isn’t real, how can we be sure that anything else is?
I used to think of cold as a force; as something that invades our bodies and kills us if it gets too deep. But that sensation we experience when we “feel cold” is really just the feeling of heat; the feeling of heat escaping our tiny, insignificant bodies. Cold feels like nothing, because — and I feel like I can’t stress this enough — it is an illusion. And perhaps that is why, when you die and you cease to exist, your body grows cold. Because you are returning to the nothingness from which you sprang forth. But dead bodies are not cold because cold has somehow gotten into them; they are cold because the heat that is inexorably linked to our lives has seeped out. Because the heat that sustains us has fled out into the world, where the law of entropy means that everything, everything except life, wants things to be so evenly distributed that there is little or no energy, and certainly no savage, bursting surges of human, animal and plant life.
What the universe wants is the complete absence of life, which is by definition greedy and full of intensity, full of inordinate beauty and energy in little points that come into being, then die once they have passed the spark to another generation of rabbits or flowers or people.
This is no less shocking to me than the news I received, many years ago, about the Easter Bunny. What other false idols do I still believe in?
Is love real, or is it merely the absence of hate? (Or, in the reverse, is hate real, or is it simply the absence of love?) I’m open to any new ideas. Nothing would shock me now.
And what about the self? We tend to think of the self as everything that is not another. That’s why our own bodies, and sometimes the bodies of our infant children, feel like they are part of us; because we simply can’t fathom that the tiny life in our arms is anything other. Because there is no other-ness to them. They are us, little concentrated points of exuberant light in a vast universe that is relentlessly pursuing a dull, motionless, even distribution of life in which no squalling baby could ever exist.
It’s important to reiterate that this is not a word game, or a matter of semantics. The same is not true in reverse. Because heat is not just the absence of cold. Heat, unlike cold, is a real, measurable thing. Heat is a fact, and even if it is not a synonym for life, it is somehow linked to life in ways we cannot ever fully understand.
It’s almost summer now, and I can feel the heat when it rains down upon me. But it doesn’t feel any more real than the winter we just had.
Of course, death isn’t particularly real, either, because like cold it is merely the absence of life and the return of energy to a tidy, lazy, even distribution. Yet while death is not real, we still feel its presence.
As I stood in the minus-twenty-seven-Fahrenheit temperature one morning, just a few months ago, listening to the clucking of chickens snug in their coop, watching my mammoth, shaggy dog as he rolled in the snow and buried his face deep in its powder, I tried to recalibrate what I was feeling. My fingers grew numb. My breath froze in my beard, creating little Earl Grey-scented icicles, and I told myself that there is no such thing as cold. There was only heat, an essential component of life, flowing out of my body.
It was just the latest reminder that we can experience the full brunt of things that are not real. Because, my God, I felt incredibly cold. And even though I know cold isn’t real, I also know what it feels like, and I don’t yet want to give up the heat that keeps me alive, that keeps me parenting, writing and learning new things about the vast world we inhabit.
This is further proof that we can experience things that are not real, and that disproven and unproven ideas can still walk the earth with us. And if I can feel cold, even though it doesn’t exist, then I can sleep comfortably in my bed at night, wrapped beneath several blankets, knowing that all the other things I’m constantly told aren’t real — love, beauty and various other gods — can still be experienced, whether or not they are really here.
Matt Geiger’s debut book won First Prize in the 2018 Midwest Book Awards and was named as a Finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the American Book Fest. His most recent book is a collection of stories and essays. He is also the winner of numerous journalism awards and one axe-throwing competition. He has an abnormally high percentage of Neanderthal DNA. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife and daughter.