Answers blowin’ in the wind

One summer, I worked in southern France, in a town that is the regular victim of the mistral—a punishing, north-northwesterly wind that blows throughout the year.

- JOSHUA HAMMER

Each day as I pedaled home from work, a howling gale blasted grit into my face and often brought my bike to a standstill. That painful three mile commute remains my most vivid recollection of the period.

As Simon Winchester writes in his delightful new book, The Breath of the Gods, these invisible currents of air shape our lives in myriad ways. A peripatetic polymath who has written books about everything from the Oxford English Dictionary to the San Francisco earth quake to a journey up the Yangtze River, Winchester weaves geology, meteorology, etymology and history into a jaunty survey of wind’s incarnations and permutations.

Wind, he argues, made possible the age of exploration and altered the course of civilisations. It has inspired great feats of engineering. It has also caused suffering, and, in the case of the mistral, has allegedly driven men to madness. “An eruption of domestic anger — even the murder of a spouse — can be blamed on the endless frigid shudderings of a mistral in full spate.” Winchester writes of these blasts, caused by air funnelling through the Rhone Valley after the collision of two pressure systems off Spain and Italy. “The wind made me do it, in other words, has some value as a defense.”

Human beings have been trying to grasp the mechanisms of wind for millenniums. Sumerians attributed it to four deities — three brothers and a sister. The Finns worshiped a blacksmith god who controls the elements.