Autumn

I've flown back to my alma mater Penn State for a week to visit Kate, tie up some loose ends, and catch the first shudderings of fall. The oaks are yellowing, the virginia creeper and sumac are already bleeding from every pore, and the red maple are primed to fire-bomb the town. Diane Ackerman, a Penn State English alumnus wrote a gorgeous book called A Natural History of the Senses, which has a wonderful section on the chemistry behind and the literature surrounding the turning of the leaves. The most spectacular displays run up and down the upper east coasts of both the US and China. A particularly poetic passage of hers follows the last threads of the leaf stem as they separate from the branch, the falling that she likens to the 'falling leaf' maneuver that airplane pilots effect, exerting the slightest pressure of the will as they descend through years of memory, to layer and sweetly decay, perhaps to finally end up as a fossil imprint - a testimony to things that burn brightly and pass. I think the president (er, perhaps not the current president) ought to read this passage on national television every October 15. Each year I resurrect Ackerman's observation that the beauty of autumn - the exquisite combination of blazing leaves, the low sun, stretched blue sky, and contrasts of light - is entirely non-utilitarian. Autumn stand apart from the wonderfully contrived, seductive beauty of natural selection. Astoundingly, autumn is not selling anything. Autumn just is. Like Your Face.

\Au"tumn\, n. [L. auctumnus, autumnus, perh. fr. a root av to satisfy one's self: cf. F. automne. See Avarice