These are the last good days of the maple in the backyard. Fall is falling fast, faster than normal, and real life has meant I haven’t paused much to see it. But this tree is pretty incredible at the moment. If you walk upstairs at the right time of day — after the sun has indicated it will, once again, go to the west — you can see something special right now.
All of that red bounces off the leaves, through the window into the bedroom, off the door and into a bit of the hall.
Which makes sense. It looks like that tree is on fire.
This is the moment where autumn feels helpless. Can’t appreciate it long enough for fear of the encroaching winter, worried you missed prime opportunities to soak it in earlier. I’m not sure if there’s even a word that describes it.
The Germans, of course, give us weltschmerz, which has to do with a deep sadness about the insufficiency of the world. In some contexts, the world can mean “the pain of the world.” Doesn’t that sound like the season’s late lament? A broader definition came to use just a generation later, by the mid 19th century, “a mood of weariness or sadness about life arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering.”
Henry Miller, so maybe we’re on to something here. But maybe this is a slight step removed from weltschmerz — John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut used it, too. So maybe, let’s call it … fallui, autumn’s languor.
