Wit & Attitude Quote by Hal Borland

Beauty is easy to praise when it stays politely in the landscape. Borland’s snowdrift is a quietly barbed lesson about how quickly aesthetic admiration curdles into annoyance once the lovely thing becomes your problem. The line opens like nature writing - “a beautiful thing” - then swerves into the domestic and municipal: shovels, blocked roads, destinations. That pivot is the engine. It exposes a familiar hypocrisy in how we consume the natural world: we like it best as scenery, worst as friction.

Borland, an American author known for observing the outdoors with an ordinary person’s eye, isn’t romanticizing hardship. He’s sketching the boundary where reverence ends and inconvenience begins, and he’s honest about how thin that boundary is. The snowdrift becomes a proxy for anything we celebrate in theory but resent in practice: weather, wilderness, even people and ideas that are “beautiful” right up until they complicate our plans. There’s also a sly dig at control. Roads are human promises of straight lines and on-time arrivals; snow is the indifferent reminder that the world doesn’t care about your schedule.

The sentence works because it refuses a noble moral. It doesn’t pretend we should love the drift unconditionally. It admits the petty, practical self that emerges the moment beauty demands labor. That’s not cynicism so much as a clear-eyed accounting of what admiration costs.