The Topical Autobiography of Mark Dorset

Autumn’s Promise

    Margot and Martha and I had been lovers for forty-seven years when we visited the New York Botanical Garden to see an exhibit of the Japanese art of chrysanthemum culture called kiku. At the entrance to the Haupt Conservatory, where the kiku exhibit was held, we were greeted by a poem printed on a placard. It had no title. It was identified only as “Japanese poem, ca. 905,” and was presented in an English translation:
 
        they have not yet
        begun to fall but already
        I regret their passing
        when I see the colors of
        the autumn leaves at their peak
 
    For a moment after I read the poem, I agreed with its sentiment, but then, a moment later, I felt that I disagreed with it. A moment later I changed my mind again, and then I began wondering why I had such ambivalent feelings about it. A few moments later still, while we were strolling through the exhibit, I realized that the poem aroused in me a set of conflicting attitudes toward autumn that had originally been inspired by nature and modified by the academic calendar.
    At some point in my childhood — I’m not sure at what age, but certainly during my elementary-school years — the rhythm of the school year began to overwhelm the natural rhythm of the seasons, and in short order school had supplanted nature as the force that defined and determined the emotional pattern of my year.
    For people who live close to nature — or who feel close to nature even if their lives are not actually lived close to it—the year begins with spring. The metaphor of spring as youth and autumn as the onset of age underlies not only the pastoral pattern of planting and harvesting but also post-pastoral cultural artifacts from Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Ehrwachen (Spring Awakening) to Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s “September Song.” Everything rises in the spring and falls in autumn, including hope; everything is moist and supple in spring, and everything is dry and stiff in autumn. However, school reversed the pattern for me and my schoolmates—as I imagine it did for you, if your school experience resembled mine. In increasing measure as I advanced through the grades, spring brought with it not a feeling of freshness and renewal but the dread of examinations, fear of failure in every form imaginable at whatever age I happened to be, performance anxiety both academic and social, and the awful sense that time had run out, that it was now too late to make up for the mistakes I’d made in the months that had passed since the school year’s beginning.
    Ah, but then came summer vacation and its Lethean lightness, and after summer vacation, autumn came around again, bringing with it the promise of a new beginning. This year, I told myself every autumn, would be the year when I got everything right, when I didn’t make mistakes, when spring would bring triumph, instead of the usual feeling of having fallen short. The autumn leaves had not yet begun to fall, but already my pulse began to quicken and my heart soared when I saw their colors at their peak.
    With the passage of time, and the lengthening distance from school days, the natural rhythm of the seasons has begun to reassert itself, but school made such a strong impression on me that nature will never be able to override its effect completely. I’ve forgotten a great deal of what I learned in school, especially mathematics and chemistry, but I learned the rhythm of the school year so well that it became “second nature.” As I respond to the seasons as they pass, I find that the schoolboy is still alive within the man that I’ve become. The spring still brings that boy the fear of failure, and he still suffers through nightmares about papers that he hasn’t written, exams he hasn’t prepared for, books he hasn’t opened; summer still brings him careless relief; and the autumn leaves, the brilliant autumn leaves at their peak, elate the schoolboy in me, enough so that when they begin to fall, and the man in me begins to regret their passing, and the year that is going, and the years that are gone, the boy’s joy and autumn’s promise are enough to help me believe that when they have fallen and I enter the ultimate winter of my life, this time I will be spared the terrifying spring.

 
Autumn Leaves at Their Peak
Westchester County, New York
[click to enlarge]