The panic and the pathos of fall
Autumn, almost every nature lover’s favorite time of year. What is it about the reddening of leaves and the cooling of breezes that makes this season so enchanting? It is sublimely beautiful, of course, but it is also brief. Summer and winter last for months on end and spring, although fleeting, carries with it the promise of summer. Autumn, on the other hand, is not only over almost before it has begun, but it is heavy with the melancholy of decay, decomposition, and winter’s approach. And this is autumn’s charm. It is knowing that in just a few short weeks the leaves will be gone, the days will be that much shorter and the cool will have turned to true cold. In knowing this, many of us navigate these weeks in an almost manic depressive state as we swing wildly from bursting with joy to feeling overwhelmed by sadness.
The Japanese call this concept mono no aware. Like its cousin wabi-sabi, mono no aware is difficult to define outside of the Japanese language and culture, but it can loosely be explained as “the pathos of things.” I once heard it described along these lines: imagine you are hosting a dinner party with a group of close friends. You are laughing and eating and drinking and talking and enjoying yourself, and there is a beautiful atmosphere to the evening. Right at the moment when you become aware of the joy you are experiencing, you are simultaneously overwhelmed by a feeling of great sadness as you realize that that evening, that experience just as it is can never be repeated. You could get the same group together in the same place and eat the same food but it would never be the same evening. That is mono no aware, and that is the magic of fall.
As soon as we see those leaves start to pick up hints of gold, red and brown, as soon as we feel the first cool breeze in the early evening, we feel the panic set in as we feel the season fleeing as fast as it came. And panic feels like the appropriate word, deriving from the Greek panikos, meaning literally “of Pan”, that Greek god of fertility, pastures and shepherds, who it was said sometimes gave a great shout when awoken from his midday nap. It is almost as if this very sound is driving us to chase down those fleeting moments.
That panic makes us madly try to cram as many “fall activities” into our calendar as we possibly can in an effort to make the most of this brief and beautiful season. And in doing so, we actually risk sabotaging our enjoyment of this time as we don’t allow ourselves to stop, take a breath and just soak it all in.
And yet, somehow, without that driving sense of panic coupled with that awareness of the brevity and pensive sadness of this season of endings, autumn would be just another spring, summer or winter, and that would be the saddest thing of all.
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