Snow fort

The snowball fight, ‘a pretty satire on war and military glory’, should, [Nathaniel] Hawthorne feels, end in the building of a monument of snow of which future observers will ask, ‘How came it here?’ For Hawthorne, it might jocularly be said, the snowforts of children are the American equivalent of European ruins.

Alain Noël (1993) would probably find even this open-ended formula much too mechanical. In his excellent critique of various regulation theories he says that the historical record teaches us that: / regulation is more akin to the snowforts children build in winter. The participants erect a wall, add a motif – inspired by the neighbor’s snowfort – open a loophole, break a side-wall in an unexpected battle, in short, they continuously build and renovate, without ever stopping, until the whole project is finally destroyed by a war, a celebration, or a heavy rainfall. An ongoing project, the snowfort is never finished until it is lost or abandoned. What matters for the participants is less the outcome than the process, less the snowfort itself that the always fragile agreement of all around a common vision, which organizes the games for a period.

The good memories he had were gone, / Like playing catch with Dad on the lawn. / He forgot about happiness, he didn’t remember / About the snowforts and toys in December.