Tag: Fall

Summer’s end. Autumn’s perfection.

September 27th, 2025
```
And because our summers were always ending, and because they lasted forever, we grew impatient with our games, we sought new and more intense ones; and as the crickets of August grew louder, and a single red leaf appeared on branches green with summer, we threw ourselves as if desperately into new adventures, while the long days, never changing, grew heavy with boredom and longing. 
```
From one of my favorite short stories Flying Carpets, by Steven Millhauser. It might be my favorite short story. Is there any other description of summer so true, going to fall so true, that has ever been put on the page? I doubt it.

Maybe Thoreau?

Steven Millhauser, The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998), 77.

A day after Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving rhyme

November 29th, 2024

Thank You
     for all my hands can hold--
          apples red,
                and melons gold,
                     yellow corn
                          both ripe and sweet,
                               peas and beans
                                    so good to eat!

From the poem Thanksgiving, by Ivy O. Eastwick.

As read from the glorious Random House Book of Poetry for Children.

Let’s be thankful today too. Happy day-after-Thanksgiving everyone!

The Random House Book of Poetry for Children. United States, Random House Children’s Books, 1983. pg 47

What is late November doing?

November 24th, 2024

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

Snow in Paris? What is November doing?

T.S. Eliot…

A snippet from East Coker.

Eliot, T. S.. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. United States, Harcourt Brace, 1958. pg124,125

The Brown Egg of a Silver Cross

October 20th, 2024

Her egg is so richly brown, so wondrously beautiful as to defy description. Every fall, when the first pullet egg turns up on the range, I bring it into the living room and enshrine it in a black duckshead pottery ashtray, where it remains until Halloween, a symbol of fertility, admired by all.

– E.B. White

E.B. White is much more than Charlotte’s Web. His essay’s rip. Mesmerize.

How many writers lull you into reading a three page essay about brown eggs vs white eggs?

White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States, HarperCollins, 2014. pg 75
All I’d nicked. The influence of Edward Gorey

October 8th, 2024

When the first two volumes of A Series of Unfortunate Events were published, I sent copies to Gorey himself, after someone managed to get me the address of his house in Cape Cod, now a small, deadpan museum of his work. I enclosed a note saying how wild a fan I was of his books, and how I hoped he would forgive me for all I’d nicked from him. (I never heard back from Gorey, but shortly afterward he died. I like to think that I killed him)

— Daniel Handler

Edward Gorey is a proper Halloween author/illustrator. I mean…his last name is Gorey for crying in the dust.

Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, reflects on how Gorey influenced his work in his latest book And Then? And Then? What Else?

Handler, Daniel, and Snicket, Lemony. And Then? And Then? What Else? A Writer’s Life. United States, Oneworld Publications, 2024. pg 79,80

Henry D. Thoreau’s month of painted leaves.

October 1st, 2024

     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.

- Henry D. Thoreau

Kick off October with Henry D. Thoreau.

Again from his essay Autumnal Tints.

Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. p. 283

A cheek toward the sun

September 27th, 2024

But I am more interested in the rosy cheek than I am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on. The very forest and herbage, the pellicle of the earth must acquire a bright color, an evidence of its ripeness, — as if the globe itself were a fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the sun.

– Henry Thoreau

I didn’t realize how poetic Thoreau’s prose was. That’s why one must read, must discover, these works for yourself.

Experience them on your own.

Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. p. 282

Autumn in America with Henry D. Thoreau

September 25th, 2024

Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. The most that Thomson says on this subject is his "Autumn" is contained in the lines, --

     "But see the fading many-colored woods, 
     Shade deepening over shade, the country round
     Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun, 
     Of every hue, from wan declining green 
     To sooty dark" : -

and in the line which he speaks of 

     "Autumn beaming o'er the yellow woods."

No one writes about seasons, weather, or fall, like Henry D. Thoreau.

This from his essay Autumnal Tints.

Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. p. 281

Slowly Autumn

September 24th, 2024

As consequent from store of summer rains,
Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing,
Or many a herb-lined brook's reticulations,
Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea,
Songs of continued years I sing.

- Walt Whitman, Autumn Rivulets

Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. United Kingdom, Penguin Books Limited, 2004. p.379

David Bentley Hart contrasting American and European Autumns

October 21st, 2023

the endlessly varying hues of America’s Autumn…

We rhapsodize about “New England Autumns,” and for good reason; but, really, Autumn anywhere in the deciduous forests of North America, especially in the East—from upper Canada to the deep South—is magnificent, and far outshines anything the Old World has to offer. In those years in which I have found myself in some corner of Europe during the Fall, I have never been able to suppress a certain feeling of disappointment at the limited palette nature employs there for what is surely my favorite of the seasons. This isn’t to say European Autumn is not lovely enough, with its muted light and drifting mists and pale flavescence. But the chromatic spectrum is narrow. For the most part, the trees pass from a darker to a more limpid green, and then to light gold, and then to ochre and brown, before their branches are stripped bare. There are occasional bright flashes of red and maroon amid the tawny pallor, though mostly from imported species of flora. But, to an eye accustomed to the endlessly varying hues of America’s Autumn, it can all seem a little insipid.
– David Bentley Hart

Always on the hunt for enlightened passages on Autumn. Of course David Bentley Hart delivers.

I’ve never considered the differences between a European Autumn and an American one. One would think Autumn is the same everywhere.

Obviously it isn’t. The biodiversity in different regions of the world make it so. But like a therapist telling you you’re not sleeping enough, it takes an attentive, neutral observer, to make you aware.

Hart, David Bentley. “The Poetry of Autumn.” David Bentley Hart on Substack, October 20, 2023, https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/the-poetry-of-autumn.

Tag: Fall

the endlessly varying hues of America’s Autumn…