Sunday, August 10, 2008
End of Summer Blues
Despite the recent good news about the workshop, I am not immune to the melancholia of the season. In the east, where I grew up, the metaphor of life's cycle and the coming end of life was plain for anyone to see, looking out the window at the dead leaves, the grey skies, the lowering clouds, but even here, where the sun is still shining and in fact, August marks the hottest of weather, the subtle signs of that cycle are still present. The grass that was fat and green is burned and sere; the flowers have transformed to rattling seedpods; some of the trees, like the ones in the east, are beginning to turn, though they generally do a pale imitation of fall in comparison to the amazing technicolor show I witnessed in Western Massachusetts, where I spent a number of years. How can we resist the thought that we are tending in the same unreversable direction in our individual lives?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
It is endlessly entertaining to see the cycle of earth's seasons as reflections of human life. When I was a child, my mother had hanging on her kitchen wall four prints that I think she'd cut from a magazine. Each was of a male and female couple in the stages of their lives together--their romance in the blush of spring, in the heat of summer, in the working harvest of fall, and in the snowy decline of winter. When I try to remember the figures now, I think they were Victorian.
Frozen like that and forever under the trees like Keats' lovers, the couple's metaphor is complete in its usurpation of actual pattern of human life, which is to move straight through the seasons, no repeating. Yet as you point out, here comes another fall.
I think that the persistent coming around of the seasons is a repeated epiphany that we don't understand for a long while. With the difficult decline of your parents, maybe you feel the seasons more sharply or at least differently than you have before.
I am sure that is true, but clearly, it is a profound cycle, one that I find also repeated in the religious calendar.
In the Jewish tradition,which has a lunar calendar, New Year comes in the fall. The New Year is a time to look back on the previous year with regret that one has not achieved the things one intended, but also to note with satisfaction areas of progress. It is also a time to apologize to others and to ask for apologies from those we think owe them to us.
For me, it has always been connected to the academic calendar as well, especially since I started college. I never liked school before that because each new school year presented more opportunities for humiliation because of my learning disability (math) and for being ostracized by my cruel classmates.
So there are many resonances with the seasons in my own life, though of course, my parents' current situations present fresh ones right before my eyes.
Post a Comment