Words in Winter

From a recent writing exercise:

It is still the dead of winter, but the world around him is coming very much alive. The sun has risen hours ago, but it is not yet midday; the top half of the building is bathed in a wash of warm russet-tinged gold, the tips of bare branches before it glazed as in a tracery of metallic filaments. Already the wash of late-morning light is trickling down the building’s grand facade. It trickles down the flutes of wide columns and into the crevices of cornices and corners, under sills and eaves. Foot traffic is beginning to increase, now. People have risen from their beds, have left their homes, all to some purpose of their own, for some individual or shared goal. They swirl around him where he stands, unmoving, on the pavement.

It is curious, he thinks. How utterly incomprehensible. This building, this bastion of knowledge and learning, pragmatic and idealistic, has been standing here for goodness knows how long. Enduring granite, withstanding the weathering of time. Has it always been this way? Do these people climbing these broad, snow-layered steps see what one would have seen a century ago? Do they see what he sees, a sort of wordless grandeur that stands against the black-and-white palette of winter, a monolith, a stone construct that embodies values now tacit and undefined? It seems to embrace the curious and the strivers and the learners, drawing them into its maw, breathing them out again.

The air is crisp and cold and holds with it the promise of a new day. Snow crystals glitter in the watery but growing sunlight, and around him more people are sweeping past, angling for the building, climbing wide steps, disappearing among the columns and inside. He inhales, tilts his head back to take in the building once more before he urges his feet into motion. Yes, yes indeed.