Thinking about time
And pushing back on pumpkin spice.
I’ve been thinking a lot about time these days: about seizing moments and surrendering them, about how we try to roll and stretch it like dough, parcel it out like petit fours, organize it, monetize it, protect it, or chase it down like an escaped pet.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that the fall season makes us pause and notice the world around us—the changes of light, the scents and textures of the season (in every region I’ve lived in, something changes in the fall, whether it’s the hurricane season in the Caribbean, or the occasional rainstorm in SoCal, or the leaves along the Appalachian ridge). That intuition has been commercialized in everything from the pumpkin spice cult to lawn banners saying, “It’s fall y’all,” but that perennial sense of being witness to change is still valid and worth reclaiming.
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (Keats, “To Autumn”)
Much lyric poetry expresses uneasiness about time: the change of seasons, daily rhythms, memories and hauntings, urgencies and eternities. Keats’s “To Autumn” (performed here by Damien Lewis) imagines the season—personified—drowsily reposing on a granary floor among the abundant harvest yields. My favorite Shakespearean sonnet, 116, concedes that change is inevitable— it’s not a boogeyman to defeat, but the stuff of life itself. And in this journey, some things, like love and friendship, have the potential to be a “north star” that guides us: “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
Take a look at the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (c. 1412-16), and you’ll be reminded that October is a time not only of reaping but of sowing, not only of culminating and celebrating but of planting and hoping. That’s encouraging to me, as I find my basket more full of to-dos than Cornucopian harvest.
It’s taken me almost three decades to make a separate peace with the autumn season. On the one hand, I love the inventive costumes and mischievous spirit of Halloween. On the other hand, hurricanes batter the Caribbean in the fall, and, when my parents and I moved to the States many years ago, autumn felt like a pull-task for the dreaded winter. I thought that the fall was terrifyingly beautiful, like a fire that was going to burn to cinders. The huge oaks on our rented front lawn rained down like sheets of crisp leaves several feet deep, like a dry primordial flood. That fall I also got my first CD, Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View, and listened to the song “Time” over and over on my boom box. It’s a plaintive and frustrated appeal to Time —"Can you teach me about tomorrow/and all the pain and sorrow running free.” It resonated with twelve-year-old me, and it’s still a troubling and evocative mix of energies—the way I felt about fall.
What I’ve learned as the years go by is that, at any given moment, we’re living through multiple seasons—projects and processes that all interweave in deep but unexpected ways. Jobs and fellowships are announced; midterm grading is due; birthdays approach; baseball season is over (RIP: Mets). My grandfather, who passed away a year ago today, has been heavy on my mind, and along with him thoughts about vocation, family, and the importance of having some fun in life.
So yesterday I put my grading down and went to a pumpkin patch with my parents, enjoyed Spartanburg’s fantastic Halloween lawn decorations, and decorated my front porch with my mom.
In the end, I think our experience of seasons ends up being far more complex and personal than the Halloween Express and flavored-latte marketers could ever imagine (or colonize). It’s also an invitation to pause in our work, and notice the rhythms around and within us.
Wishing you all a season of abundance, reflection, and hope, however you celebrate it.
What I’m reading:
Anne Helen Petersen has a great piece on the ways that calendars mediate our relationship with time.
My friend Gwen told me about Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and I was intrigued. The book shares some great observations about how we experience time in the contemporary, post-COVID world that blend neo-Stoic pop philosophy and Kanban methodology. It calls out the attention economy, the cult of toxic productivity, and the way people may “instrumentalize” time rather than existing in it. It offers some insights about synchronicity (the importance of communities observing rest at the same time) and suggestions for self-reflection. Burkeman’s quote from Marilynne Robinson’s essay on the “joyless urgency” of our relationship with time stopped me in my tracks (The Givenness of Things, 2015).
What I’m watching:
Around the World in 80 Days on Prime, based on the Jules Verne novel published serially in French in 1872 and in English in 1873. The series retains the original’s race-against-the-clock energy and idiosyncratic, armchair-traveler hero—as well as its Victorian obsession with transportation, global communication, speed, and—implicitly if noticeably—empire. The series elides many of the social issues inherent in this time period (the labor used to build the Transatlantic Railroad and the British imperial context of Phileas Fogg’s journey), while foregrounding others (the rise of the KKK, women’s professional status, the romance between Passepartout and Fixe). I enjoyed a lot about the series, from the clock-ticking intro and score to the smart dialogue and the character of Abigail Fixe. It was an entertaining and intelligent adaptation of Verne’s narrative—the characters just don’t (by design) stay in one place long enough to enact sustained social critique of the many places they pass through.
Peasant workload?
There have been pieces bobbing up and down like apples on my digital landscape claiming that medieval peasants only worked 150 days a year (presumably, spending the rest of the time dancing around maypoles and at village ales). That Twitterverse miscalculation says a lot about the erasure of domestic labor (look no further than the late medieval “Ballad of a Tyrannical Husband” for evidence that feminist economics has a long history) and the fraught nature of nostalgia for the Middle Ages. These issues are discussed in this great Atlantic piece by Amanda Mull, in which historian Eleanor Janega points out that if medieval peasants had such fantastic vacation-and-feast-day lifestyles, they probably wouldn’t have always been rebelling.
What I’m loving
The local pumpkin patch (I’ve never been to one!). Experimenting with ratatouille recipes while listening to bossa nova. Fresh baguettes with too much butter. A visit from my parents when I’m feeling exhausted from work.
