As Sherlock Holmes would say, with a lip curled in pitying arrogance: "Hempel, you see, but you do not observe."
Of course, he would not be entirely correct. There are many things I observe minutely, but the passage of time has never been one of them.
My experience of time is that it is one long, continuous taffy pull; that it will keep stretching out forever, and that a certain day or event in the future will never arrive, because time will keep on stretching. A kind of Zeno's dichotomy paradox for time, as it were. You never get there. The thing is, of course you do! And of course time doesn't actually stretch further and further; so Spring ends, Fall arrives, Fall progresses, and all of a sudden I look at dwindling brown foliage in surprise.
I love Autumn's weather; "October's bright blue weather," as Helen Hunt Jackson put it. My only argument with it is that winter inevitably follows, and although I am not filled with melancholy at the prospect, as I so often have been in the past, the colder months are still less fun than Spring and Fall, no two ways about it. At any rate, here is the poem by Helen Hunt Jackson. I discovered it when I followed up a quote about "October's bright blue sky," which turned out to be a misquote.
- October's Bright Blue Weather
- O suns and skies and clouds of June,
- And flowers of June together,
- Ye cannot rival for one hour
- October's bright blue weather;
- When loud the bumblebee makes haste,
- Belated, thriftless vagrant,
- And goldenrod is dying fast,
- And lanes with grapes are fragrant;
- When gentians roll their fingers tight
- To save them for the morning,
- And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
- Without a sound of warning;
- When on the ground red apples lie
- In piles like jewels shining,
- And redder still on old stone walls
- Are leaves of woodbine twining;
- When all the lovely wayside things
- Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
- And in the fields still green and fair,
- Late aftermaths are growing;
- When springs run low, and on the brooks,
- In idle golden freighting,
- Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
- Of woods, for winter waiting;
- When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
- By twos and twos together,
- And count like misers, hour by hour,
- October's bright blue weather.
- O sun and skies and flowers of June,
- Count all your boasts together,
- Love loveth best of all the year
- October's bright blue weather.
