By Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
A few years ago, when I was living in a different town, I used to get coffee from a girl who hated the summer. What it was she hated about it I couldn’t quite tell, probably the intensity of it. She was shy and her sentences often trailed off into nowhere. I’d pick them up with something else, probably something to do with myself. They say you make less of an impression, talking how she did, but I remember that about her. Autumn and Winter, she liked. You can perhaps tell something of her by this fact. In the dying seasons, something different is asked of you, and it is fine to just be in a warm, lit room with windows that view an almost impenetrable darkness.
Many others I know stumble into autumn, half-knowing a depressed spirit that awaits. Yet everyone is taken through quite slowly; the darkest days of winter never appear, nor does the sweltering sun, without life also leading you headway there. Daylight becomes short as you do too. That is all seasonal change and you have autumnal thoughts that couldn’t be believed in summer. I wouldn’t have remembered her in summer and why she comes to me now seems particular… not only a play of memory for memory’s sake.
The memory stands up. I am sympathetic, much, for an older man or woman questioning how the day goes by and then the week and suddenly, suddenly, they hear a voice say: “how did those ten, twenty, years go by?” and the voice is never a voice only but a fear and a tremble. This I produce for I have heard older people say it and I have said it to myself and it is perhaps the one thing I can recognize in those built on greater years than myself. The memory is a life-line to the inexorable passing of time.
Is there more to it than the vague knowing of a memory? The coincidence of autumn’s brilliance with its huge golden sun and the memory of someone I barely knew, meek and avoidant. There’s the brute fact, but what of last autumn’s walk through the forest of leaves? Or the countless others that I can spring up by will? No, perhaps it is more in line with that proverb that some ancient writers were fond of using: that everything has its season. The perpetual cycle of life and death all before our eyes every year does not necessarily find rest in an idea of repetition, rather it may be, for us, an ascending spiral drawing out our lives.
The memory fades into fragments. The leaves, meeting their season, are falling and dying magnificently. Each leaf preparing for the next lease on life, as perhaps memory does as well – each memory pointing back at you; what you were, that you were and still are. And people remark about the sun, it gives more radiance in autumn. Who knows? But isn’t something seeing everything slowly die, already privy to the secret that life recurs?
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