Signs of Autumn

Spotted on a recent walk

From Joy Williams essay, “Autumn”:

There is no such thing as time going straight on to new things. This is an illusion. Okay? And clinging to this illusion makes it difficult to understand oneself and one’s life and what is happening to one. Time is repetition, a circle. This is obvious. Day and night, the seasons, tell us this. Even so, we don’t believe it. Time is not a circle, we think. Spring screams the opposite to us, of course, and summer seduces us into believing that we’re all going to live forever. Winter couldn’t care less what we think about time. But fall cares. Instructive, tactful, subtle, fall is a philosophy all its own. Occult, secretive, taking pleasure in sleep, in rest. Fall’s comfortless, honest rot. In the beginning in most places it’s showy, the better to mask its melancholy: raging leaves and spanking breezes, edgy with the real cold. And that special, solemn light. For fall is for melan- cholics and those in love. The torchy sort of love. Forget spring. Spring is nothing but promise, a reproach to melancholics. Spring makes us forget the deal, whereas fall is the deal. The unutterable, unalterable deal.

Fall is. It always comes round, with its lovely patience. If in the beginning it’s restless, at the end it’s re signed, complete in its waiting, complete in the utter correctness of what it has to tell us. Which is that we’re transitory. We’re transient, we’re temporary, we’re all only sometime. We will pass and someone else will take our place. Our pursuit of living founders each time we remember this. Fall is the darkening window, the one Hart Crane had in mind in his poem “Fear,” the window on which likes the night.

Found in Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals.