Sublime

freezing.

Freezers, as my Smeg taught me, provoke strong emotions. They are fundamentally for forgetting, the place where we put food we don’t want to think about right now, or want to save for some unspecified later date. They hold our memories, aspirations, and regrets, and in this strange way they tell us who we are.

FREEZE

But what are the words that describe the emotion of “freeze”? Words that might feel right: Shut down. Numb. Immobilized. Disconnected. Petrified. The very word sympathetic means “with emotion,” while parasympathetic—the system that controls freeze—means “beyond emotion.” You may feel disengaged from the world, sluggish, like you don’t care or

covered the land in ice, pinning reindeer on

freezing. Helium, even at absolute zero, does not freeze, unless the pressure is made so great as to make the atoms squash together. If we increase the pressure, we can make it solidify.