An autumn meditation: death, ghosts, and contemplation

Autumn is the season when, for some of us, thoughts tend toward solemn matters. I’m one for whom annually that’s the case. Fall is my favorite season for a variety of reasons. Among them, I find it to be a time of greater introspection than the activities of the preceding spring and summer usually allow. Along with the invigorating spectacle of fall leaves, the celebration of harvest plenty, fires in the woodstove, the cider and the pumpkins and the ale, and all the other sensual and cultural pleasures – in sight, sound, and scent – that I associate with this turn of the rolling year, I also detect the obscure presence of something somber and sobering lingering just out of the full reach of my consciousness, yet felt to be pervasive everywhere. I find that this constant impression of a tarrying, shadowy presence not only doesn’t detract from the cozy contentment of autumn’s delights but mysteriously intensifies the sensation. Joys are most joyful, I believe, when they are intermingled with significance. Autumn is the season when I taste the truth of that at its most sapid. There’s nothing incongruous, it seems to me, in the fact that the months of October through December have long been regarded as best suited to the telling of eerie tales. After all, what those glorious fall leaves signify to our impressionable psyches – we feel it in our bones – is the mystery of death. This thought reminds me, rather willy-nilly, of quotations from writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ray Bradbury.