“I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources.”
—Thoreau, journal, Dec. 5, 1856
Photo taken on Lake Erie yesterday.
Winter in America
On Spotify I came across a live version of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Winter in America” (from Tour De Force) that starts with an opening monologue that isn’t included on the record cut:
There’s only one season lately. There used to be an agreement between the seasons, that they would all stay for three months, and then go wherever seasons go when they’re not where we are. Lately there has been no spring, no summer, and no fall. Politically, and philosophically, and psychologically. There has only been the season of ice. It is the season of frozen dreams and frozen nightmares. A scene of frozen progress and frozen ideas. Frozen aspirations and inspirations. They call the season “winter.” We call the song “Winter in America.”
The song is followed by another monologue that’s a little lighter and funnier:
People say to me, “Gil, we cannot find your records.” I say, “Go to your record store. Go down to the left. Take a turn, go to the right. Look on the bottom shelf. You will find a box called ‘Miscellaneous.’ We are miscellaneous. We did not mean to be miscellaneous. Somehow it happened.”
Monarchs, migrations, and modulations
1. Our neighborhood was filled with monarch butterflies last week. “More monarchs are expected to fly through Austin than have in 10 years,” says a report from KUT. “Thanks to exceptionally good weather up north, where monarchs lay their eggs during the summer.”
Monarch butterflies are making their way through Texas to wintering spots in Mexico…. Think of Austin as a rest stop for migrating monarchs. Just as you need to fill up your tank when you drive down I-35, monarchs need to stop to eat. In the fall, they fill up on the nectar of certain flowers; in the spring, it’s milkweed they need to lay their eggs on. Austin adopted policies to grow milkweed in the spring and summer and encourage the growth of native pollinator plants.
2. Flying from Austin to Los Angeles this week, I watched Won’t You Be My Neighbor? At the beginning of the documentary, Fred Rogers is shown sitting at a piano and talking about modulation — a fancy word for changing keys. He shows how some key changes are more difficult than others — C major to F major is pretty easy, for example, but F major to F# major not so much. He felt that his job was to help children through the modulations of their lives.
3. Migrations and modulations. Movement and change. “Maybe I’m trying to combine things that can’t be combined,” Fred Rogers says to the camera. “But it makes sense to me.”
How beautiful they go to their graves
“How pleasant to walk over beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling fallen leaves…. How beautiful they go to their graves!”
—Thoreau, October 12, 1853
Thoreau, our great chronicler of the seasons, wrote a lot about the falling leaves in October, noting all the different colors and hues. Their colors aside, he thought, like many things in nature, they could teach us something about accepting our own internal seasons, and our mortality.
October 22, 1853:
Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed upon the earth. This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. This annual decay and death, this dying by inches…. The year’s great crop. They teach us how to die.
October was a the time he thought about the end of life. On October 20th, 1857, he meets a poor old man who has gathered apples in his shoes. “This man’s cheeriness was worth a thousand of the church’s sacraments and memento mori’s.”
October — Harvest Time — was also a month for Thoreau to contemplate his “harvest of thought.”
October 14, 1857:
I take all these walks to every point of the compass, and it is always harvest-time with me. I am always gathering my crop from these woods and fields and waters, and no man is in my way or interferes with me. My crop is not their crop. I am not gathering beans or corn. Do they think there are no fruits but such as these? I am a reaper; I am not a gleaner.
And on October 24, he writes, “My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground…. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.”
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[Update: 4PM: I had no idea that Thoreau actually collected his thoughts on fall in the 1862 essay, “Autumnal Tints.” See this piece, “Revisiting the Splendor of Thoreau’s ‘Autumnal Tints,’ 150 Years Later.” This is one of the amazing things about reading Thoreau’s journal before you read the published work — he pilfered so much from his daily writing that you know exactly where sentences and sections come from, and it’s fascinating to see how he changed them.]
The season of fruit, a harvest of thought
Henry David Thoreau wrote of a melancholy he felt in late August for the year which was quickly passing. His diary entry for August 21, 1852:
The sound of crickets gradually prevails more and more. I hear the year falling asleep.
And a year later on August 18, 1853:
What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now,—as if the rest of the year were down-hill, and if we had not performed anything before, we should not now? The season of flowers or of promise may be said to be over, and now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit? The night of the year is approaching. What have we done with our talent? All nature prompts and reproves us. How early in the year it begins to be late! It matters not by how little we have fallen behind; it seems irretrievably late. The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life.
He was one of our great chroniclers of seasons, and felt, very strongly, that we had seasons within us. Here’s what he wrote the next year, on August 7, 1854:
Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you? Do not your thoughts begin to acquire consistency as well as flavor and ripeness? How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character?