»On a glass of ice
Some years ago, I had the thought to write a book on ice. In addition to a prècis of the chemical and physical properties of ice, I wanted to focus on the social aspects of the thing. Ice separated classes, divides the restaurants of different countries, and made possible the cocktail. Chemical ice makes possible the global distribution of once-local delicacies; ice as a physical force has shaped our neighbourhoods and our continents.
Ice has great importance to scientific and political issues: at the Earth's polar caps, it represents a bank of fresh water that might be used to share water with arid countries; in relatively unexplored areas of the world, the ice is a time capsule that contains undisturbed microörganisms from tens of thousands of years. For extraterrestrial explorers, ice holds the promise of past or future life; for terrestrial explorers, ice is a wonderland, full of adventure and excitement from the skating-rink at Rockefeller Center to glaciers in New Zealand.
I wanted to examine not these, but the social history of the stuff. In literature and in popular culture, ice has connotations beyond its physical properties. My outline and notes did not amount to much of a book, and I have long since filed the idea next to my Great American Novel (iteration one: the road trip, but not On The Road) and my examination of the language of sacrifice in the Greek dramatic corpus (I got to examples one and two, the second of which I wrote with the title, "The Religious and Poetic Imagery of Wine-Drinking in the Cyclops of Euripides"; the first is yet unfinished; I wandered into a critical examination of The Cyclops itself, and never recovered. I wonder why, to this day, very few critical studies of the sole surviving satyr play exist). I no longer have my notes; they were on a computer that was lost, reformatted, stolen; they were merely a handful of citations, from mid-nineteenth-century travellers' accounts of encountering ice in American hotels, from sea captains who dragged shiploads of the stuff from Canada to points south, and so on.
... The social aspects of ice are evasive, subtle, and would require more diligence to unearth than I have in me. I would be quite happy to travel to Florence and look for the bar where Camillo Negroni adulterated the Americano (Campari, Vermouth rosso, and soda) with gin, to see whether he had his served up, with a famously thin layer of ice atop, or on the rocks, in an elegant tumbler (after dozens of Negronis, I still cannot decide). I could walk the far reaches of Nunavut and see how the ice has shaped the land -- and how that, in turn shapes the people (for that matter, I could walk through San Francisco, or New York, and see ditto. But I have never visited Nunavut.) I could walk through Buenos Aires (which recently had its first snowstorm in almost a century) and talk to wharfers who unloaded ice from ships a few generations ago; I could find the communities in Russia and in Scandinavia and in Manchuria where people need to cope with moving about on ice almost every day of the week. Marco Polo reported on people who skated along the ice, with curved shoes.
A few years ago, Mariana Gosnell's book Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance appeared, and I figured the market for books on ice was probably saturated. I started reading this book, but it was both sufficiently different from the book I wanted to write and more meandering; I did not get very far.
All of this came to mind as I filled a glass with pieces of ice from the automatic icemaker in the refrigerator (there's another book: On refrigeration. This would be both a social and scientific book, but not as much about the physics or chemistry of refrigeration, but about the public-health aspects.). I enjoy drinking water from an iced glass: as the ice melts, the clear taste of the water refreshes me. This is one of my indulgences: the energy and expense of ice.
