Entering Fall

I remember being 4 years old and watching my father split wood in the fall.

For me fall is a place where Joy dwells.  What C.S. Lewis calls Joy.  That sense of something more precious and more real beyond the fields we know.  Not just more precious and more real but ultimately precious and ultimately real.  There are times when I have caught a sense of Fallness, my eyes have wept, my heart was pierced.  Because it was so beautiful.  Because it was just beyond my reach.  One wants to merge with it.  One cannot.

(C.S. Lewis had it the same way, it turns out.  There is a passage in Surprised by Joy where he reads Beatrice Potter:

The second glimpse came through Squirrel Nutkin; through it only, though I loved all the Beatrix Potter books . . . it administered the shock, it was a trouble. It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened; and as before, the experience was one of intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire (that was impossible – how can one possess Autumn?) but to reawaken it. And in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension’ . . . [it was] an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy . . .)

The more conscious of Fall I have become, though, the further away it slips.

Lewis said you could never be in the thing–“how can one possess Autumn?”–but I think you can.  You lose yourself sometimes and you come to an awareness of you peeling apples out on the crisp grass while the kids gallop through the first-fallen leaves, you can smell you neighbor roasting green chile, and for one infinitely small and eternal moment you are in the fall and aware of it.

They say–I say–that all eternity is like that.

See also the Autumnal Objective Correlate