Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. – George Eliot
It’s that time again! All my long-time readers know that autumn is my favorite season of the year for a number of reasons, not the least of which are the shorter, cooler days. I love the autumn weather, the turning of the foliage, and all the autumn holidays from now until Yule (including my birthday), but there’s also an indefinable something else I cannot adequately or rationally describe. In the absence of more precise words, let’s just call it autumn magic; it’s a sort of resonance I have with the season, a deep sense of rightness that never fails to lift my spirits and has even helped me to pull out of long, deep depressions on a number of occasions. Weather-wise, the last few autumns have been a great disappointment to me; the summer heat lingered until the end of September, so that when the crisp weather eventually did arrive it was limited to a few short weeks in October before giving way to the November chill. But not this year; the Dog Days petered out after only two weeks, and by mid-August we were opening the windows at night again. By the beginning of this month most days were unseasonably cool, and there have been several days lately on which we haven’t had to turn on the air conditioner even at mid-afternoon. Though the southbound sun crosses the celestial equator at 14:49 GMT today (9:49 US Central Daylight Time), autumn is already underway here, and as far as I’m concerned it could not come too soon.
If this is your first autumn with me, you may be interested in reading my previous two columns for the occasion. As usual, I wish all of my readers a happy holiday, and ask that whatever your beliefs may be, you all receive success and happiness in your personal, sexual, emotional and professional lives. Blessed Be!
I live in Arizona. What is this “Autumn” that you speak of?
I totally understand that; it was that way when I lived in South Louisiana. If we had any autumn at all, it was about a week around Thanksgiving. But usually, we went straight from late summer into early winter. One of the reasons I moved to the Upper South was to be able to enjoy autumn.
I second that. We have 25 weeks of winter here, 25 weeks of summer and, if we’re lucky, we get a full week of spring and autumn.
Of course, the other reckoning of the seasons goes directly from winter into highway construction.
Woo-hoo! You and me both, Maggie. ‘Tis the season of form-fitting turtlenecks (or “tactical turtlenecks” as Sterling Archer calls them), sweaters, sweater-dresses, and soups and stews, etc. I think we may actually be getting a bonafide fall around here this year. So far.
Ireland is about the same latitude as Labrador, whereas you are parallel to north Africa. The seasons here must be very different to yours; we’ve had autumn colours for a few weeks, the nights and mornings are decidedly chilly now. There’s a marked difference in the daylight hours, and soon there’ll hardly be any. It’s quite possible to leave for work in darkness, work indoors, and return home in darkness, not knowing whether there has been any (feeble) sunshine. Jealous, moi?
Even worse for me, I live in Finland.
Used to like autumn before I started to have problems with seasonal affective disorder, now I start to feel a bit down several weeks before it actually gets dark enough for the lack of light to bother me, in anticipation. If I was rich I think I might like to spend the late spring, summer and early autumn here, possibly sometimes late winter when it starts to get light again but there is still snow. And escape somewhere a lot further south for the dark months.
Is there any way you could go further south (say, Germany or the Balkans) to work in the winter?
If I could, I’d escape to somewhere warm and sunny to escape the worst of winter here. Costa Rica sounds nice…
Hi Maggie,
Off topic but perhaps of interest given the numerous times that the meme “This is your brain on – heroin, porn, sugary drinks, sex, etc. – pops up. It’s from The New Statesman.
An excerpt…
In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and his collaborator Daniel Simons advise readers to be wary of such “brain porn”, but popular magazines, science websites and books are frenzied consumers and hypers of these scans. “This is your brain on music”, announces a caption to a set of fMRI images, and we are invited to conclude that we now understand more about the experience of listening to music. The “This is your brain on” meme, it seems, is indefinitely extensible: Google results offer “This is your brain on poker”, “This is your brain on metaphor”, “This is your brain on diet soda”, “This is your brain on God” and so on, ad nauseam. I hereby volunteer to submit to a functional magnetic-resonance imaging scan while reading a stack of pop neuroscience volumes, for an illuminating series of pictures entitled This Is Your Brain on Stupid Books About Your Brain.
None of the foregoing should be taken to imply that fMRI and other brain-investigation techniques are useless: there is beautiful and amazing science in how they work and what well-designed experiments can teach us. “One of my favourites,” Fletcher says, “is the observation that one can take measures of brain activity (either using fMRI or EEG) while someone is learning . . . a list of words, and that activity can actually predict whether particular words will be remembered when the person is tested later (even the next day). This to me demonstrates something important – that observing activity in the brain can tell us something about how somebody is processing stimuli in ways that the person themselves is unable to report. With measures like that, we can begin to see how valuable it is to measure brain activity – it is giving us information that would otherwise be hidden from us.”
In this light, one might humbly venture a preliminary diagnosis of the pop brain hacks’ chronic intellectual error. It is that they misleadingly assume we always know how to interpret such “hidden” information, and that it is always more reliably meaningful than what lies in plain view. The hucksters of neuroscientism are the conspiracy theorists of the human animal, the 9/11 Truthers of the life of the mind.
If I may beg the Mistress of the House’s permission, a PSA:
The twitter account of Dan O Connell (@viverebenissimo) who has commented here before, has started sending out Tweets and DMs with links being flagged as malware/spam.
That’s happened to several Australian sex worker Twitter accounts today as well. I suspect it isn’t coincidental.
The mountains here are starting to reflect some glorious autumn colors. I’m looking forward to breaking out the sweaters!
Both Spring and Autumn are my favorite seasons, because 1) They are moderate in temperature, and 2) The presence of transformation is more readily apparent.
Since I’ve had a crappy summer, my autumn MUST be better. It really must.
We got cooler weather JUST as we were going to move my mother into her new apartment. It was some of the best timing the atmosphere has ever shown me.
But the last two weeks or so, summer made a come-back. Now that it’s going to be October, I hope the Dog Days, wherever Sirius is in our skies, will end as the month of September does.