Legends of the Fall

Autumn & Everything After

Photo by quentin on Unsplash

This weekend it will finally be fall. I’m thrilled. In the words of singer and erstwhile TV producer The Weeknd: “I come alive in the fall time.”

Autumn has long been my favorite season and the most creatively fertile time of my year. Keats called it “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”¹ and to me fall has always felt—appropriate to the harvest and the start of the school year—ripe with possibility.

It’s not the fresh, green potential of spring or summer’s promise of adventure. Autumn is, after all, a time when things are ending: fruit stripped from the vines, trees giving one last riotous show before surrendering their leaves, summer flowers dipping low and returning to the earth. It’s a season of decay as much as abundance. But that’s exactly where that feeling of potential comes in: the boundaries between life and death feel thinner in the fall, and that creates a new, broader sense of what’s possible. Autumn is a deeply mystical season, both enveloping and elusive, comfortable and disquieting.

That makes me want to write, to try to capture some hint of the season’s strange beauty—a beauty more true, I think, to the nature of life than the promises of any other season. Winter, spring, and summer insist upon themselves, try to convince you that things will be this way forever. Only fall is honest with you: life is change, all beautiful things fade, wilting and sleeping until they awake again.

“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” Mary Oliver wrote. She was writing about summer, but it’s autumn that inspires the same words in me. The leaves are falling; before the branches are bare, why not write something, try something, create something? It’s the harvest of the heart: you pluck its fruits and lay them on the table, because they’re no good shriveling on the vine.

Oliver wrote actual poems about autumn, too. One of them includes these lines:

This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

As we shift from one bright vision to another, I hope you have a chance to try something new, to read a book you’ve been meaning to get to, to create something that wouldn’t exist without your inspiration and effort. At the very least get yourself a pumpkin-flavored something. Like all things autumnal, they’ll be gone before you know it.

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Things Seen & Heard

• As much as I love the poems above, I have to admit that my favorite short writing about the fall are the Mr. Autumn Man piece from The Onion and a certain McSweeney’s essay on decorative gourd season.

• My favorite fall book is Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, although I’m excited to (hopefully) finally read Roger Zelazny’s A Night in Lonesome October this year which I hear is great.

That’s all for this week! Enjoy the first weekend of fall!

1. Before you think “Wow, John is so erudite and well-read,” I should admit that I only know this because of a comic book.