Article édifiant sur Vox autour du déni de chaleur

 Heat is deadly. Why does our culture push us to ignore it.

Tough it out : 我慢する

L’article figure dans la série The Vox Guide to Extreme Heat, qui n’évite pas malgré tout les images d’illustration suggérant la résilience comme norme. Personnes à la plage, s’aspergeant du contenu d’une bouteille d’eau sur la tête avec le cagnard brillant en perspective. 

“In fact, heat has been associated with physical and emotional endurance since the earliest modern novels — Don Quixote was very much toughing it out on his way to tilt at windmills. Narratively and thematically, heat typically represents hot tempers, madness and paranoia, and a growing tension and unease that often leads to aggression. It also co-exists with the concept of coolness — of “never letting them see you sweat.”

One character who did let us see him sweat did so in a movie that embodies the concept of calm under pressure — Paul Newman as Cool Hand Luke. The 1967 classic saw Newman nonchalantly dripping all over the celluloid while delivering an iconic performance as an unflappable prisoner serving a brutal term under grueling, sweltering conditions. Newman typified idealized masculinity that only grows stronger when put to the test — a test that in Cool Hand Luke includes enduring the heat.

The idea that oppressive heat is a phase that has to be borne until it passes — usually thanks to a climactic “break” in the weather like a rainstorm — exists in the narrative DNA of too many stories to count. Novels from One Hundred Years of Solitude to The Great Gatsby to Atonement use heat as a structural and thematic device to intensify emotion and conflict, push things to a breaking point, and then generate catharsis.”