Meaning of Weather

A sweeping history of our relationship with weather in art, media, philosophy, religion, and science—and how the climate continually defies demystification. We moderns tend to take the weather for granted.  We know it through hourly timetables and radar maps and otherwise make it the subject of predictable and safe conversation. But weather is not safe or predictable and never has been. People have long used all their ingenuity to imagine and portray its shifty ways.  As John Durham Peters argues, a closer look at the history of these efforts, from painting and poetry to cartography and close observation, has the potential to disclose something important about what it means to live in the world. In The Meaning of Weather, John Durham Peters shows how the long history of understanding the weather has seen dreamers and data-crunchers alike craft remarkable visions of the world around us. From Babylonian astronomy to the Event Horizon Telescope, from illuminated manuscripts to television, and more, Peters explores the kaleidoscopic ways people have sought to understand, tame, or manage the weather—and how the climate resists being bridled. In this magisterial telling, Peters reimagines Western culture as a continuing struggle to know ourselves and each other through an ever-changing environment.