Season of myths (2)

And now here we are in the other autumn, the season of the night that is separated from Keats's mellow fruitfulness by broad, bleak meadows full of sharp, smoky-scented dusk. If winter is a graveyard, this time of year is a deathbed; and all the sadder and more wonderful for that.

No words of mine could match the numinous prose of Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times:

Darkness seems to collect at this time of year, as though it had trickled downhill from late June's solstice into the sump of November. Fog settles onto damp leaves in the woods - not Prufrock's yellow fog or the amber fog of the suburbs, but a gray-white hanging mist that feels like the down or underfur of some pervasive beast.

White birches line the slopes beyond the pasture as if they were there to fence in the fog, to keep it from inundating the house in a weightless avalanche. The day stays warm, but even at noon it feels as though dusk has already set in. The chickens roost early. The horses linger by the gate, ready for supper.

Usually I feel starved for light about now. But this year I've reveled in these damp, dark November days. It's a kind of waking hibernation, I suppose, a desire to live enclosed, for a while at least, in a world defined by the vaporous edges of our small farm.

Season of myths (1)

After spring, this is my favorite time of year. Animals sense the change of season much more than at the beginning of summer or winter. On the first day of September, regular as clockwork, the horses were getting rolly-eyed and jumpy. Officially autumn doesn’t start until tomorrow, but they smelled it on the air even then.

Autumn is a story with a beginning, middle and end far clearer than the meandering narrative of summer. On a day like today (in London, at any rate) we have pale clear sunshine and the crispness on the air. This is harvest festival time with all its mellow fruitfulness. Later, after the leaves fall, we’ll have bright and biting days, and then the smokiness of Halloween and the gathering evenings as the year curls up.

I liked Rowan Pellings’s recollection of her mother’s riposte to Keats, pinned to the school noticeboard:

Mum [believed] that Keats's take was too darn hazy, over-ripe and somnolent, with its "soft-dying day" and mournful gnats. In richly purple doggerel she defended the crisp, taut energy of autumn: the first frost, the harsh, pure light, the crunch of leaves and the crackling of fires. How could Keats have failed to note the sorcery of the harvest moon, or the sheen of a conker fresh from its shell?

The last of the four Mirabilis books is Autumn. (Or Fall – we still can’t decide between those two titles, as the American version has other connotations, of course, which become significant as Jack faces his ultimate challenge.) It’s going to be the best opportunity for Leo and Nikos and Mike to really show their mastery as we see, not only the close of the year, but the seeping away of fantasy as the green comet fades:

“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.”

Ah, but that’s all a long way off. We have five hundred more pages to do before we get to write “the end” and mean it. Hope you’ll be along for the whole journey.