Greetings, writers—
Over at Letters of Note (a Substack I’ve recommended before), Shaun Usher gathered a dozen letters about fall, in which people talk about “that lovely light over the ridge at sunset1,” “the trees flowering into flame,2” etc. (The “metal and farewell” line comes from Louise Bogan.)
Here’s Jane Austen’s Anne Elliott, taking an autumn walk in Persuasion:
Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn—that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness—that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
Ha! A “thousand poetical descriptions” and “every poet worthy of being read.” See? Everyone has something to say about fall.
I love that first week of it, when the air’s so crisp and the sun streams its clean gold over everything. The problem is that just around the corner, that PNW gray damp lurks like some kind of lumpen monster, and then it only gets colder and darker and wetter until May, by which point you’re growing mushrooms on your arms and whenever you look in the mirror you see some pale soft amphibious creature wearing your shirt and your earrings.3
Fall makes me think of cozy fires, rain, wool sweaters, and death.
What does fall mean for you? Write something—a poem, a song lyric—about the season. Or set a fictional scene in fall, or have one of your characters opine on autumn, or reflect on what Joy Williams tells us is the message of fall:
Fall is. It always comes round, with its lovely patience. If in the beginning it’s restless, at the end it’s resigned, complete in its waiting, complete in the utter correctness of what it has to tell us. Which is that we’re transitory. We’re transient, we’re temporary, we’re all only sometime. We will pass and someone else will take our place. Our pursuit of living founders each time we remember this. Fall is the darkening window, the one Hart Crane had in mind in his poem “Fear,” the window on which likes the night.
“Fall is the darkening window”—is that too depressing? I kind of love it, though.
Here are a couple other writers on the subject of fall, for inspiration:
“[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
“LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House
“I love the autumn—that melancholy season that suits memories so well. When the trees have lost their leaves, when the sky at sunset still preserves the russet hue that fills with gold the withered grass, it is sweet to watch the final fading of the fires that until recently burnt within you.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman and November
Happy writing—
Emily
Vita Sackville-West
May Sarton
Today I took a run and got so wet that it looked like I’d taken a shower in my running clothes.
gardens of angels
hailing early autumn light
across battle lines