Tag: autumn

Bare Ruin’d Choirs – Seasons and Similes of Old Age

I have been intending to write a blog about the notion of “singularity,” but my readings on the subject seem to go on and on, so I thought I would just look around me and write about the season and the seasons of life.

This is my first autumn back in New England after almost a decade.  We moved from western North Carolina two months ago (just in time, I guess).  Autumn was longer but less colorful North Carolina; there were the brilliant yellows but not the mellow golds and reds.  Fall has always been my favorite season, and I am looking forward to the colors, the smells, and the urgency of buttoning up the house (nesting) before winter arrives.

If autumn is my favorite season, October has always been my favorite month.  For years (until the printing wore off), I used a coffee cup inscribed with Thoreau’s quote about October. Here it is, to remind us to imbibe some of the magic Henry found in October:

October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

Back to our earliest records, poets used the seasons of the year as similes for the seasons of life.  We still do it all the time, talking about a “December bride” or someone being “in the autumn of his years.”  These are apt similes, much like that of the Baby New Year and Old Father Time.  We grow and blossom, reap the karma of our earlier life, and close in ourselves with the narrowing of the light at the end of the year.  One significant difference, of course, is that our lives are linear, while nature recycles upon itself. (Or, as Dante contends, the life span is a parabola! See further discussion of that possibility here.) Perhaps the problem is how we look at it; if we could accept that we are part of nature perhaps we would see it differently.

Cicero, in his “On Old Age,” uses many images of old age that relate senescence to the cycles of nature.  Thus we have age as the “tranquil evening” of the life’s day, as the “autumn” or “winter” of the life’s year, as the ripening, maturing, even withering fruit of the tree of life:

There had to be a time of withering, of readiness to fall, like the ripeness that comes to the fruits of the trees and of the earth.  But a wise man will face this prospect with resignation, for resistance against nature is as pointless as the battles of the giants against the gods.

Clearly, the giants of Silicon Vally do not agree that “resistance against nature” is pointless, but more on them in my next blog.

Shakespeare starts his masterful Sonnet 73 about old age with these lines:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Latter day poets use the images of the seasons all the time to connote the ages of man; when Philip Larkin wrote his comic masterpiece about growing older, he titled it “The Winter Palace,” and ended with the image of a last December snowstorm:

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

For more examples, revisit Chesterton’s “Gold Leaves,” or Rilke’s “Autumn.” To find more correlations between the seasons and the stages of life, just look at my (incomplete) list of poems about old age.  And please send me any of your favorite poems to add to the list. Or write one.

But, back to me and to the month of October.  I used to think I was in the October of life, but that is foolish at this point.  If I were a maple tree, my leaves would have long since been raked up and hauled away.  I am more “bare ruin’d choirs” than the rich golds and yellows of this lustrous October.  I am surely in November, and probably most of the way to Thanksgiving.  The “later twilight” of life.  Robert Frost said that sorrow was his “November Guest,” but yet appreciated the season:

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow…

Yet, I can still enjoy the present October while looking over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of past Octobers, Septembers, Mays.  And forward to the dark and quiet evenings of December.

Whispered Words of Wisdom – Let It Be

I like autumn as a metaphor for old age. I know it is not a perfect metaphor; golden leaves on the trees renew themselves in the spring, but we cannot renew ourselves in the same way. Hopkins points out that the “Goldengrove unleaving” is a reminder of the “blight  man was born for.” And it is. And yet. I recent read a memoir by Pico Iyer entitled Autumn Light and would highly recommend it – or any of his books. There was this about fall in Japan:

And every year the autumn poses the same question, which I, every year, am barely able to answer. There’s no time to waste, the yuzu-colored light reminds me; and yet it would be a crime – a sin – to turn away from the beauty of the season. The bright days make me unable to resist the impulse to go outside; the days of sudden, unrelenting rain commit me to solitary confinement. I am not always ready to accept that it’s in surrendering my hopes and careful designs that real freedom comes. (my emphasis)

And it is really surrendering that I want to talk about – letting go. It should be so easy, and it is nevertheless the hardest thing. And not just for me. Every meditation or contemplative group that I have participated in comes back to this again and again. We know it will make our life easier; we know it is inevitable in the long run. But we cannot do it. And I would note here that letting go is not the same as disregarding; detachment is not apathy.

I have always known intellectually that letting go would help. When my son complained of stress at work, the only advice I would give him that I knew was right, was to not take it seriously, to let it go. To do the job well, but with detachment as to results and the regard of other people. This was advice I was never able to follow myself, but I knew it would have allowed me to work longer and healthier. And better. It’s even true of relationships – we all know of relationships that fell apart because one of the partners tried too hard, held on too tight, as William Blake knew:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Maybe it’s a little like dieting. It should be the easiest thing in the world not to eat. So it is with worrying, fretting, blaming, catastrophizing. Who wants to frighten ourselves to death? Apparently, most of us.

In old age many of the worries of our youth should have dissipated. Our children are grown, ambition has run its course, (most) passions are dulled. But that seems to make little difference. We worry about our grandchildren, our aches and pains, our declining loved ones. There is always something. But we also have our own very real experience proving that 99% of the things we worried about never came to pass – and even when catastrophe materialized, it was seldom as bad as we expected. Shouldn’t we have learned? The truth, I think, is that we have learned, but old habits die hard.

One thing we know will happen. We will die. Worrying about that not only won’t help, but it will diminish the days we have left. I started with the metaphor of autumn for old age. Autumn is a wonderful season, my favorite. But it would be spoiled if we just saw it as a harbinger of winter. Let it be say Lennon and McCartney. Fear no evil says the 23rd Psalm. You can only lose what you cling to says the Buddha. Consider the lilies says Jesus.

If you have figured out the trick to this – to letting go and letting be – let me know. Let all of us know.  Please.

My story, “Every Winged Bird,” does not give us an answer, but it does give a picture of someone who has given up everything which does not give her joy. It was part of a series I wrote inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Ovid knows about change, and in another poem he said “happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.” He doesn’t tell us how, though.