Several days this week have had a coolish tinge and my thoughts turned briefly to Autumn. Such August foreshadowings have happened to me several times before, with each experience producing a deep pang of anticipatory joy. It was not so this week. Instead, dread.
The title of this piece could well have replaced its comma with an equals sign, autumn=elegy. Or perhaps one might imagine these two words appearing in the same thesaurus entry along with others: wistfulness, lament, convergence, recessional, farewell. Autumn is all those things—a fullness, a fruition, a condensation of the promise of Spring, the fecundity of Summer. Is it any wonder that it is the season for the making of jams.
And, yet, under and around this elegiac, backward gaze there also exists a forward facing foreboding, a miasma of dread for the coming winter, as the daylight dims ever earlier and the cold winds blow.
Given all of this it is a wonder that Autumn is the favorite season of so many of us–of us brooding poet types, in any case. But that is so because the wistfulness and foreboding are all pierced and punctuated clean through with beauty that is almost too much to bear and the juxtapositions of contraries too irresistible—bounty and death, grays and exploding colors, a chilling world and warming hearts, dimness and light.
As I thought about approaching Autumn this week, it was the lack of some of these counterpoints, these charms against the darkness, that was really bumming me out. I mean it is well and good to spend cozy evenings inside with our families and significant others. Indeed, I have frequently been reminded on social media by my introvert friends over the past few months that their moment has finally arrived! It is their Golden Age. And, yet, perhaps in this terrible and extraordinary year even the most insular of introverts perhaps may have had their fill.
I know that I at least will miss the sparkle of the dinner parties, the glimmer of the pubs pouring their light out into into the grayness, the cramped comfort of a hayride, the workplace boasts of how many friends and relatives one had over for Thanksgiving. And, later, just as the season officially tips into Winter, I will miss the cozy comfort of friends crammed into a living room singing Christmas carols. And New Years parties this year? Well can you imagine how crazy they will be…that is, if we can have them at all.
And of course in this most unpredictable of years, there is no telling what might happen. It may even be that many of these things that I so long for may still be a possibility. But it would not do to count on them. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick…”
So, instead I am hoping—I am asking—in counterpoint to the travesty of this year for this to be the most beautiful Autumn in living memory. May it be that somehow we can experience one of those serendipitous wonders that occurred due to our lockdowns such as the clearing of the canals of Venice or the appearance of distant snow clad mountains normally obscured by smog. And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in the deadness of Winter we will hear news of a hopeful Springtime with relief for the world, where the weak and the vulnerable may no longer fear this pestilence and where we may all gather together in joy.
“…but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
