Abraham Janssen: Personification of Autumn
Today
is distinctly transitional. For
starters it is the birthday of Louis XIV, supposed herald of one of the world’s
more dramatic transitions (“Après moi, le deluge!”) that, so far as I can tell
from the tenor of our political conventions, is still in progress. Yes, I know it was actually Louis XV
who didn’t say that, but history is much better as servant than as master. Further transition: I have just
delivered my latest opus (The Dark Side
of the Enlightenment) to W. W. Norton in New York, where it will begin the
copy-editing process. Further yet,
I am also preparing—or rather avoiding preparing by writing this blog essay
instead--to fly off in the morning to London. There we have before us a couple of weeks of R&R in the
delightful form of visiting family and friends and simply knocking about.
But
the most conspicuous sense of transition is simply calendrical. So much of what we think of as cultural
or spiritual experience is actually climate controlled. Somewhere C. S. Lewis points out that Shakespeare’s
sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” might really be meaningless to
an Eskimo.
The
current essay of my friend Kathy Taylor, a fine writer and the proprietor of
the admirable blog “In 999 Words…or less,” deals with the disturbing suddenness
of September. She was writing from
Cape Cod, but there seems to have been something particularly definitive about
the last day of August widely through the northeast. It was not particularly cool, but for a day the mugginess
disappeared. We certainly
experienced it in the New York area, even though for me the day was blighted by
an automotive disaster that preoccupied my attention for several hours.
Growing
up as I did mainly in the South, I always found the poetic iconography of
autumn (as in the justly famous ode of John Keats) strangely artificial. That is because it derives from the
fifty-first latitude north as it crosses England and not the thirty-sixth as it
passes across America. One of the
major images in Keats’s “To Autumn” is that of the stubble field. We know something of the genesis of the
poem’s composition from a letter written by Keats to his friend Reynolds in
September of 1819. “How beautiful
the season is now--How fine the air.
A temperate sharpness about it.
Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never liked
stubble-fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring.
Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look
warm.” Warm might serve for the south downs of England, but it would be a
distinct understatement for Arkansas.
Often enough some of the hottest days of the year came in
September.
So
also did some of the hottest and sweatiest work—particularly haymaking, which
might also be called “making stubble fields.”. So rapid is the pace of
technological change that many of the experiences of my youth are more than
forgotten. They have actually
vanished from the earth. I go back
a ways, certainly to a time before hay-balers. On our Ozark farm we did have a mechanical mower and a
hay-rake—essentially unchanged from their prototypes of the 1870s. They were horse-drawn, though a tractor did appear in my teen-age years.
The
hay-raker first made long rows of the sun-dried grass, then cut them up as best
he could into roughly similar shocks or piles. Among these piles the horse (or tractor) pulled a large,
makeshift wagon. One man stood on
the wagon and tried to distribute as evenly as possible the hay that was being
pitched up by the men on the ground.
It would not be easy to say which was the harder job.
The idea was to get as much hay onto the cart as possible without
risking the disaster of its tipping over on the way to the barn, where,
incidentally, it was always at least ten degrees hotter than in the hayfield
itself. There still exists,
somewhere, one of the few “candid” photographs depicting my teen-aged
years. I am atop a huge load of
hay at least the size of that in Bosch’s “Haywain”. The local population depicted by
Bosch is vaguely reminiscent of
the Ozarks too.
All
that is gone—part of a large transition.
Tomorrow night when I step out of the plane at Heathrow, I hope to
accomplish a somewhat smaller one.
I hope to to recover something approximating Keatsian autumn. I cannot guarantee that I will find her
“on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, drows’d with the fume of poppies”; but
the experience is likely to be somnolent enough to make the blog schedule for
the next two weeks a little casual.
