The Staten Island book – which can be ordered here (it has returned from the printers, and is being bound) – originally consisted of twenty-one essays, about 45,000 words; the publishers selected ten of these essays to make a more compact 20,000 word “chapbook,” a better size book for the press and, of course, far more likely to be read (brevity, always a virtue, is not less so when the theme is Staten Island). Included in the excluded essays were four pieces about the seasons. Among the essays, they were not the worst – two of them were included by the editors in their first proposed version of the published book – but in the end it was decided to leave them out. And here is the first of them, “Autumn.”
Autumn
“For happiness, I would have but three things: old wine for drinking, old wood for burning, and old friends for conversation.”
One of the minor but perfect pleasures of the revolving year, is smelling in one’s nostrils for the first time the odor of burning wood in autumn. How many subtle beauties are in that moment! The sensation of time’s passage as another summer passes, drawing us closer to death; the appreciation of man’s labor and providence, which has laid up food and warmth for the days of cold and scarcity; the wonder of the wood of the tree, which for strength and beauty and usefulness we have not matched with any of our creations; the sweet decline towards the coming season, the hour of hearth and home, wherein our savior was born, and which is the most beautiful of all the times in New York City. These beauties are in that simple signal smell of autumn.
Autumn’s is a scholastic charm. Cool dry air is the perfume of thought. The breezes of evening overtake one before one reaches home; they dispose the mind to reflection and to memory. Our wandering summer paths lead us home at the fall. At this time we see once more old friends, are close by our families, and feel the gaps left by the dead. Children return to school, and their teachers; at twilight you see them wandering home on the darkening lanes.
In the autumn I am never inclined to take the straight path, but I never wander far. It is a pleasant time to walk, but the days are full of duties, and the darkness comes too soon. Nor do the destinations of summer have their old appeal: the tree is no longer a good place for napping, nor the ice-cream parlor for tarrying, nor the beach for swimming. Most of the insects are gone; the animals are otherwise engaged, in their migrations or collocations; and the flowers have all gone to seed. The mind returns to itself, in that sweet season, when the summery objects of sense have diminished, but the senses themselves not chafed and challenged by winter’s indispositions.
Autumn is the season in which we pay our respects to our trees. From the fire rekindled on our hearth to the books we reach for once more – I find myself always drawn to Irving again, who is through all his works a golden, autumnal writer – to the spectacular colors all around us, in autumn more than any other time we feel the joy of living beside trees.
The rich yellows and oranges and scarlets of our autumn, – and I believe our autumn is the the most glorious on Earth, though I am willing to sample the autumns of others, if they contest my claim – are the result of the descent of the sugars and chlorophylls of the leaves into the roots, where they are stored for the subsequent spring. It is said that this descent does not introduce new pigments, but rather removes the obstructing old ones. The colors are always present in the leaf, though we do not see them; yet another proof of the saying, That the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it. How many other hidden beauties we might see, if we could have at once the eyes of saint and scientist–. But in the fall the veil is lifted somewhat, that we might see the fringe of the truth.
It is a fine diversion, to watch for the first tree to markedly turn, which on Staten Island is usually the red maple. The first tree has the glory of standing out against the green of its neighbors, a still hand in the midst of laborers, a philosopher who has found the emptiness of the unexamined life a bit early. And yet it is no mere idler, but only pauses when its roots are full, and its work done. Its is the radiance of the young lad who had gotten out of a last-period test early, because he knew all the answers, or a working-man who did so much on Thursday, that he has no jobs left for Friday. The brightening of the tree is the smile of a day’s work done well, a radiance of gratitude. Leaves are not machines, merely to sputter and brown on the stem and be replaced; and the trees are not slave-drivers, to work them until the sap freezes in their veins. Nature reminds us that we are not functionaries merely, but part of the greater glory of God. And the glory of our nature sometimes is only revealed when we put aside our labors, and quiet our desires, and determine to make do with what we have. The Golden Age is not the first but the last of the ages. It is not the place we have fallen from, but towards which we work. It begins when the desirous green of acquisitiveness has faded, into the golden hue of gratitude.
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