Twenty-Four Songs, One Walk

On Archetype, Winter, and the Journey That Is Never Just a Journey

14 June 2026 ~ 4 min read

Every year, when I begin teaching Schubert’s Winterreise, I start somewhere else. I start with Vivaldi.

Most of my students assume The Four Seasons is about the weather. It isn’t. Vivaldi runs the cycle the way a life runs — Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Birth. Flourishing. Harvest. End. The cycle is not a year. It is the arc of a person walking from the first light of their beginning toward the last season, and the music knows that before the listener does. Once my students hear that, they are ready for Schubert.

Winterreise is a song cycle of twenty-four songs. A man walks away from a town in winter. He has lost his love. He passes a frozen river, a linden tree, a graveyard, a crow that follows him, three suns in the sky, and at the end an old organ grinder playing to no one. My students always want to know why the lover left him. They want the backstory. They want to solve the breakup.

But that’s not what the cycle is about.

The lover is a pretext. The departure is a pretext. What the cycle is about is the walk itself — the slow, patient, unflinching passage of a human being through the winter of his life. What he carries. What he cannot put down. What he refuses to see until the music forces him to. By the final song, the wanderer is not a jilted lover. He is everyone. And the old organ grinder turning his crank with numb fingers while no one listens — he is the terror at the heart of the cycle. Not because he is cruel, but because he is there. The world keeps going. No one is listening. He plays anyway.

That is the same terror Homer wrote about three thousand years before Schubert was born.

Odysseus wants to go home. That is the plot. But the plot is a pretext too. What the Odyssey is about is the journey itself — the ten years of storms, temptations, monsters, losses, and returns to places that are not home. Odysseus is not walking toward Ithaca. He is walking through everything that has to be walked through before a person is allowed to come home. And when he finally arrives, he is not the man who left. Homer knew what Schubert would also know: that the journey changes the walker more than the destination changes the landscape.

A journey is never just a journey. That’s the archetype.

When I sat down to write Three Moons, I did not set out to write a novel in the shape of Winterreise. The shape came because the story required it. An elderly woman walks into deep winter to find her nephew. That is the plot. But the plot is a pretext. What the novel is about is the walk itself — the passage of a woman through the last landscape of her life, carrying everything she has refused to see, arriving not at understanding but at the act of arriving.

Once I saw the shape of the walk, I saw the twenty-four movements. The novel has twenty-four chapters. Not because I forced the count, but because Schubert had already taught me how long a winter journey takes. Twenty-four is the number of stations on the way through. Twenty-four is the number of times you pause, look around, and keep walking. The structure was not imposed. It was recognized.

Colleen is not Schubert’s wanderer. She is not Odysseus. She is not Vivaldi’s man walking toward winter. She is herself — a maple sugar farmer in northern New England, the last of her community, the last of her practice. But the journey she walks is the same archetypal walk the others walked. The pretext is different. The landscape is different. The walker is different. The walk is the same.

What students want when they come to Schubert is a story. What Winterreise gives them is an archetype. What I hope Three Moons gives a reader is the same gift — not the answer to why Daniel didn’t come home, but the walk itself, and what a woman sees on it, and what walks beside her through the snow.

Homer. Vivaldi. Schubert. And now Colleen.

Four journeys. Four walks. One archetype.

~ Liam