Only polo and golf rank as posher sports than skiing. It requires special equipment and a flight from the urban matrix and can only be practiced a few months a year. It tends to go along with a stay in a stodgy cabin with a fireplace and perhaps wine with dinner. My own first associations of it come from Silver Spoons, and it was invented in Norway; it must be the essence of stuff white people like. Not only that, it's now culturally infested with insouciant teenage white boys who listen to grunge music and bad electronica.

Yet I find myself wondering if skiing might still be compatible with the contemplative life. It takes one into a remote and sometimes quiet alpine locale. It gives the skier a chance to check his temper against the slope and the conditions as she found them. Indeed, might not the spirit of adventure be essential for a writing life—mightn't it be necessary to look into a fearsome, needless drop, and dare it to disappear? Perhaps so. But then, only in the heart can one speak of adventure.