Mackenzie 2018/1

It’s less precise than Fahrenheit — but that’s what’s so great about it

A little over a decade ago, I moved to Montreal expecting, perhaps foolishly, that I would become fluent in French. It was a goal that proved elusive — I just couldn’t master the Quebecois accent, which was almost inscrutably nasal compared with the Parisian French I learned in high school. I stuttered through one quotidian exchange after another, painfully aware I was marking myself as a clumsy outsider. It was exhausting. Somewhat chastened, I gave up on French and turned my attention to a new language: Celsius.
I gravitated toward Celsius for the same reason I had wanted to learn French: to experience the world through a foreign filter. Besides, I didn’t really have a choice. Montreal is a bilingual city, but it uses just one temperature scale: Celsius. Of course, the same is true in every country aside from the United States and a few other global superpowers like the Cayman Islands and Belize. Using Fahrenheit in Canada was a sure way to brand myself not only as a recalcitrant American but also as a maniac.
My hope was to internalize Celsius, not just to learn it but to feel it in my American flesh. The first thing I did to acquaint myself with it was to memorize relative temperatures scattered throughout the scale so I could extrapolate from them. I was already aware, as most people are, that what I knew as 32 was 0, but I also came up with a few useful way stations: 10 in Celsius was 50 Fahrenheit; 21 was 70; 30 was 86. With this loose constellation of data points, I could safely guess that 15 degrees C, say, was about 60 degrees F, without constantly cross-referencing between the scales.
When I started walking around with Celsius in my head, I noticed that such minor gradations don’t really matter — it was hot, or it was cold, or it was neither. I would survive. There was something psychically soothing about that.
This was especially true in Montreal, that giant ice floe of an island whose winters are so brutal that Celsius often served, for me, as a kind of safeguard against overreaction. When I saw that it was -10 degrees C, for example, I somehow took comfort in the notion that that was really just 14 degrees F, even though each scale was measuring the same thing. The shield held for the most part, except on those rare mornings when the air temperature nose-dived to around 40 below, where Celsius and Fahrenheit finally collide.

When I moved back to the United States about seven years ago, I got an iPhone and changed my weather app to Celsius. It annoyed my friends, who thought I was being pretentious (I was). Still, I think there was more to it than that. Being around people who used Fahrenheit made me feel as if it were sort of extreme.
I don’t mean to be dramatic. I wasn’t losing my mind. Far from it. After years of compulsively checking the weather multiple times a day, what happened was I started trusting my instincts and abandoned the forecast altogether. Celsius, I came to realize, had put me in touch with nature; it had forced me to spend my time walking around feeling the temperature without feeling the scale I was using to gauge the temperature.
In my heathen state, I’ve come to believe that all temperature scales are, for daily reference, sort of useless, or at least unnecessary. They present the semblance of control over your immediate environment, and yet they also distance you from experiencing the world unfiltered by some random metric. The weather is much less worrisome, I’ve found, when you aren’t constantly taking its temperature.
Source: The NYT Magazine, Feb. 28, 2018.