December has arrived, and with it, the holiday season has popped its head over the horizon, and I’m more in the mood to start touring winter-themed locations in Second Life. By coincidence, Cica Ghost dropped me a line to let me know she’d just opened her end-of-year setting in her homestead region of Mysterious Isle, thus giving me my first outing to a winter setting to mark the approaching year-end.
Called, appropriately enough, Winter, the setting comes with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, first published in 1922. Eliot is, again entirely coincidentally, one of my favourite writers of the 20th century, and it is not unfair to view The Wate Land a one of the most important poems of that century (and this, if you want my opinion, remains true for this current century as well 🙂 ).
Given my love of Eliot, there is a danger here of me getting side-tracked into an examination of Burial of the Dead, from which the quote has been taken:
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow– TS Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922
However, I’ll spare you any such thing, because the focus here is on these particular lines, not the poem as a whole or even part of it from which they have been taken.
In their standalone state, these two lines perhaps encompass ideas of the joyous warmth we can so often feel when seeing a snow-covered landscape, together with the opportunities for us to forgot the worries and concerns of life whilst enjoying unique forms of play and fun snow can encourage – or simply by walking through snow and appreciating the quiet beauty it so often brings.
Befitting this, Cica presents a snowy landscape intended for wandering and finding its wonders. The latter particularly come in the form of Cica’s engaging creatures, all of which are – once again, appropriately – white. In this, what I found particularly attractive about Winter is its monochrome-like environment, one in which I’d recommend enabling Shadows in your viewer if your computer is up to it.
This build does offer fewer places to sit than many of Cica’s previous installations through the year; to me, this encourages the idea of walking through this winter wonderland, rather than jumping from sit point to sit point, this making it more enjoyable. In this Winter is an easy-going, happy setting in keeping with the season for many of us, allowing us to ease into the winter months, the holiday season and prepare ourselves for the year’s end.
SLurl Details
- Winter (Mysterious Isle, rated Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 