Happy Thanksgiving Week!

November is in its last week, and December is fast approaching bringing with it my beloved cold winter months, which, by the way, is perhaps the main reason why I so much love this time of the year—of course, in addition to the wonderful colors of fall and the magic of the falling leaves. This very morning I was just thinking about how, in many respects, the world around us seems to be falling apart as leaves fall in autumn, and everything seems on the verge of a spectacular implosion. This immediately brought to my mind a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke titled “Autumn,” which I searched for on Google—instead of in my overcrowded library—and quickly found. In the poem, however, the twilight feeling is tempered by the surrender to the Divine contained in the last two lines:

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,

as if orchards were dying high in space.

Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling

away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.

And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands

infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

The re-reading was delightful and pleasant, but even more so was… the search! In fact, I had the chance to stumble upon some very beautiful poems I had completely forgotten or didn’t know about earlier. One of them is a real pearl. It’s from Rilke’s Vergers (Orchards), his late book of poetry written in French—after the turmoil surrounding World War I, the great Bohemian-Austrian poet seemed for a while to renounce all things German, and embrace, in his own words, the “dear borrowed language”… Biographer Donald Prater writes that “he compared French to ‘a beautiful vine-ripened over the centuries’ and cultivated according to well-defined laws: a language with a clarity and sureness which his own was far from having achieved” (D. Prater, A Ringing Glass, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 363).

Here is the short poem in both the original French and an English translation (by A. Poulin):

Sur le soupir de l’amie

toute la nuit se soulève,

une caresse brève

parcourt le ciel ébloui.

C’est comme si dans l’univers

une force élémentaire

redevenait la mère

de tout amour qui se perd.

The whole night rests 

upon a lover’s sigh, 

a brief caress 

crosses the dazzled sky. 

As if in the universe 

an elemental power

again became the mother

of all love being lost.

What a gem, isn’t it? Thanks, Fall, for yet another wonderful gift! As a matter of fact, if it wasn’t for the above-mentioned Google search for Rilke’s “Autumn,” I probably would never have known about this little masterpiece. Even though we all know that nothing happens by chance. Never has, never will. Happy Thanksgiving Week!

An Ode to November

Who said November is a sad month? It actually isn’t so bad. Au contraire. It can be such a beautiful time of the year, at least as long as it’s not raining all day every day! November is not only the month of harvest and thanksgiving, a month to remind us to be thankful for the many positive things happening in our life, it is also a time when great things can happen, and often do happen, as I myself can testify—I could tell you of that November day when heaven and earth merged and became one, but I won’t...

At the same time, however, it would be useless, if not impossible, to deny that there’s something melancholic about this month and autumn in general, as Ernest Dowson’s poem “Autumnal” suggests:

Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer's loss
Seems little, dear! on days like these.

Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time's deceit.

Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees.

Yet, sometimes melancholy—a rather underrated state—is okay. Feeling melancholy isn’t an illness or even a problem, it’s a particular species of sadness that arises when we’re open to the fact that life isn’t a Disney movie, no matter how badly we’d like to be princes or princesses, and that failures and disappointments, including the most painful ones, are part of the human condition. Melancholy is wisdom, it helps us grow. Melancholy is beauty. As Charles Baudelaire once put it, “I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.” Or, in Edgar Allan Poe’s words, “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.”

In another of his poems, Dowson wonderfully expresses a melancholic attitude towards life, or what we could call a November feel. The title of the poem—which is a line from one of Horace’s odes—is in Latin, “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” and means, roughly, “the shortness of life forbids us long hopes.”

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

What an ode to the most mysterious time of the year!

Let's Be Fair with Ourselves

Detail of victorian stained glass church window
 in Fringford depicting King David, the author
of the psalms in the Old testament
with a hand harp

There are people who master the art of tearing their lives into confetti-sized pieces and starting all over again. I don’t know whether I would be able to do that, nor do I know whether I would actually like to. What I am certain about is that life is never black and white, never a simple question of right or wrong, true or false. Life is a continuum—not an either/or, nor a series of episodes or a straight line, but a circle, where the opening and the conclusion finally meet at the same point. Therefore, as a general rule there’s no need for radical and fundamental changes in your life, lifestyles, and attitudes, or to dramatically subvert your system of human relations. Contradictions are, after all, not only the propulsive moments of the Hegelian dialectic, as all students of philosophy know, but also the soul of humanity and the substance of who we are. They are what make each of us unique. Let’s not despise human nature and what makes it what it is! Let’s be fair with ourselves and towards our fellow human beings, and may we always say with the psalmist, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and has crowned him with glory and honour.” (Ps. 8:4-5, KJV)