“All the instruments agree..,” It’s actually part of a line from an Auden poem, his famous elegy written in response to the death of W. B. Yeats on January 28, 1939. What all the instruments were in agreement about was that the day of the great poet’s death was “a cold, dark day”. I now hear the phrase about the agreement of all instruments being applied to almost anything the speaker wants us to believe is certain. In fact I have myself used it in that sense. Of course Auden himself had in mind far more than just the weather or the meteorological instruments used to measure and describe it. The instruments of mind and heart and artistic aspiration were likewise in mournful concord at the loss of so great a poet. When a great life, talent, or virtue is extinguished, the physical loss is often the least of it. The death of greatness casts a very large shadow. The application to art and artists is hardly a new one. At the death of Orpheus all of Nature wept.
As it happens, the agreement of all instruments beginning with those of the meteorologists has been much on my mind this week on account of the unusually dramatic arrival of autumn. The calendrical event took place on Monday, though I think that the actual measurable equinox was yesterday. The drama of autumn’s arrival, however, was not in the calendar but in the change of the weather itself. The last day of summer was sultry, hot and moist. The first day of autumn was cool, crisp and dry. Like most of the rest of the country we had been following news of the terrible fires on the West Coast. We have friends in Portland, and a close friend here has a daughter and grandchildren living there. Along with the refreshment of cool air in central New Jersey came the news of considerable improvement three thousand miles to the west. They had had some rain, enough to douse some fires and slow down others, and to clear away some of the clouds of suffocating smoke. Our friend’s daughter reported by phone that she and her kids were at last able to go out of doors comfortably, and “even to breathe some fresh air.” Again all the instruments, or at least several important ones, appeared to be agreeing.
Is the paradox here real, or simply imagined?—that the refreshment of new life should appear with the advent of the season of waning, retrenchment, indeed death? For death did indeed arrive. On the last Friday of summer came the news that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of our Supreme Court had died. The national outpouring of sadness and admiration has been extraordinary. I can remember no other such widespread lament for a defunct jurist in my lifetime. Its genuine basis cannot be doubted even though it is probably exacerbated by specific political anxieties as well as a much more generalized feeling of foreboding triggered by the disquieting anxieties of the medical pandemic.
Most of us operate on an emotional plane on which the personal and the public, the interior and the exterior, the individual and the cosmic are in interplay. As the years have rolled by the autumn has become for me an ever more wistful season. I think I have probably written about this more than once. Certainly I remember an essay I devoted about a year ago Keats’s great “Ode to Autumn”, among the many excellences of which is the poet’s perfect capture of the season’s paradox, or at least the somber interplay between fruition and decay, vitality and extinction. Then, in yesterday’s newspaper, I found a beautiful little essay entitled “At Summer’s End” by a fine Nashville writer named Margaret Renki, a contributor to the Times who specializes in such topics as the “flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South”.
Though it didn’t get around to politics or culture, exactly, her essay is full of little gems—about the natural world and about the lessons of life and art that world teaches. I suppose one could say the same thing about the “Ode to Autumn.” But at heart her column was for me an instance of déjà vu and not that only. For I have not merely seen it before but read and written it before as well. Ms. Renki would appear to be considerably younger than I, for her sense of vague plangency at fall’s arrival appears to be a new thing for her. It is one I have known for at least two decades. “But perhaps the reason I didn’t feel sad about the onset of fall when I was young,” she writes, “is only that I was younger, with my whole life still ahead.” Yes, perhaps so. But the analogy of the course of human life and the course of the vegetative year, with the beginning of autumn the definitive beginning of an end, is surely hard-wired? All the instruments agree.
