Blizzards such as this are ever rarer — I hadn’t worn my heaviest snow jacket and boots since 2015.

A key point to keep in mind, I decided as I trudged against the wind, was not to be anywhere near one of the occasional behemoth plows that seemed to be the only other moving things outside in Boston this morning of the great storm. I could barely see the tractors in the blowing snowflakes and through the ice crusting my glasses, except for the dim eyebeams of their headlamps; there was no reason to believe that the plow drivers would be able to see me on foot at all.

Let’s not end up as the body that they only find at the next thaw.

On the other hand, there are worse ways to go, for sillier reasons than one last attempt to play the flâneur of the nor’easter, Atget in the New England snow: to experience for a few minutes — until the cold becomes too much to bear, because unlike the old general and the other figures out in it I am not made of bronze — the odd selective erasure of the city and (for that matter) the world. By that I refer to the sensation that there might be nothing beyond my blowing-powder-limited field of vision.

The graveyard of rime-encrusted statuary and the arched leafless branches over them might be the sole contents of reality. Past the point where the world faded into the featureless white was nothing more.

There’s a sort of eschatological horror to the notion.

Indeed, I knew it was time to head back to warmth and light when I found myself wondering if all these figures — allegories of fine ideals as dead as the commemorated great men who in theory devoted themselves to those fine sentiments — always experienced their afterlife this way, forgotten and frozen in their solitude in an abandoned pocket universe of snowdrifts and bare branches.