For many years now I have noticed that each new approach of autumn brings with it a heightened feeling of solemnity, of melancholy really. It is perhaps a part of the aging process. I suspect that many if not most elderly people might recognize the phenomenon of which I speak. This year’s gloom-ward turn was quite marked, and very abrupt. It’s not quite yet a Stephen King novel, but it tends in that direction. The first few days back from Europe were bright, sunny, clear, and crisp. October and early November are usually quite beautiful around here. I can remember in at least one recent year, and perhaps two years, when I felt obliged to write a few words about Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”. It’s one of the language’s truly great poems, and while it captures something of the atmosphere of life’s narrowing constriction and even decay, it is the “mists and mellow fruitfulness” and the “beaded bubbles winking at the brim” that carry the day. Above all there is a sense of gradualism, a time to prepare for something unwelcome. But this year’s crossing of the autumn equinox has seemed like a sudden leap into the dark.
I am not partial to “significant” acronyms—but SAD (seasonal affective disorder) really nails it. Everywhere and always the gateway of life is light. The light shined in the darkness, and the darkness did not overwhelm it, and the light was the life of mankind. Is there a more important line in the Bible? If you prefer a more secular text, there’s a beauty in Shakespeare. Just before he stifles Desdemona, Othello says “Put out the light and then put out the light!” The first light is, of course, the candle that has lighted the way to her chamber. It is the second that is the more terrifying. The light that he will put out is the life of a beautiful and innocent young woman; but to accomplish such a dark deed he must first have extinguished the light of his own reason.
Certainly seasonal affective disorder is a kind of shorthand, or maybe longhand, for light deprivation. That, in any event, has been my perception this year. The more normal indicators of autumn are there, to be sure, but they are not yet prominent. The general sense of the vegetation is still that of jungle and indiscipline, entangling vines hardy and ubiquitous everywhere in the woods. The coloring of the leaves has begun in a few places, but the overwhelming sensation of sunny daylight hours is still that of “green mansions”. But suddenly with our return to America there don’t seem to be any more sunny days. There has been a streak of dark, rainy days. The rain has been steady, and often heavy. The ground has over this period gone from a state of being parched to sogginess, with small pools of standing water in low-lying spots. The temperatures have also fallen dramatically into the low 50s and on one day the high 40s. The effect is not of an autonomous autumn to be enjoyed, but of what I’ll call pre-winter, which is very different. Pre-winter actually invites unease, apprehension. The cloud-darkened skies obviously exacerbate the waning of the light. There is no discernible dawn. The night simply turns from black to gray. And nightfall descends suddenly even before our early dining hour.
One of my favorite childhood poems was “Bed in Summer” by Robert Louis Stevenson. In it a young lad laments that he is not allowed to stay out and play through the lengthening summer light: “In winter I get up at night/and dress by yellow candlelight…In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day…” I was probably eight-years-old, living in my grandparents’ house in cold and wintry Colorado when I learned the poem; and it was the summertime injustice that captured my attention. Now it is the associations of winter, the most arresting of which is the invasion of darkness.
I remember mentioning in another essay—a fairly recent one devoted to O. Henry-- some of the curious books gathered together in the eccentric library of my uncles and aunts. There was one that fascinated me, although I am not sure I remember its title. It may have been, and probably should have been, Last Words. It was an anthology of famous last words as recorded by history and literature. Several were the valedictories of condemned criminals, some of which were very famous indeed. There was, for example, Jesus: “It is finished.” There was Patrick Henry: “I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.” There were two sets of last words by the formidable John Brown, the brief but electrifying statement he made before the court that had condemned him, and the short note he had in his hand as he set off toward the gallows: “I , John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.” By no means were all of the last words so stirring or memorable. Some of them were obviously accurate accounts reflecting the realities and confusions of the death-bed rather than polished rhetoric awaiting the engraver. Under these circumstances quite a few of the entries in the book seemed to me a little banal. One that sticks in my mind is that of Ulysses S. Grant, whose brief valedictory was “Water!” But the one that remains with me most memorably was the dying cry of the great poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s on March 22, 1832. According to his doctor, this great man’s last words were Mehr licht! “More light.”
