Autumnal Forests and la recherche du temps perdu
When I was in college, more decades ago than I care to share, I had a picture by my bed for a couple of years. It depicted a wood in autumn with subtle light/shadow and colors ranging from deep green to gold to scarlet. It was printed on a piece of cardboard and I have no ideas where I got it, except that I vaguely associate it with a candy box. I loved this image and could get lost in the autumnal scene. It reminded me of an enchanted forest, perhaps out of a fairy tale. The mood was that of a hushed quiet aloneness, of time passing, of the arrival of autumn and the death of summer. One could wander into the image and find restful solitude but with a hint of mystery. I have always loved the fall colors blazing away, trees in any season — and being alone. This picture captured just those feelings.
I had moved half way across the country to attend a college that accepted me into the music program. In retrospect I am pretty sure they accepted me with the confidence that I would discover my lack of real talent and would find my way elsewhere. — Which I eventually did. This college did not have dorms so I moved into an off campus apartment with a girl several years older than I. Our mothers had been best friends during their careers as ballet dancers. My roommate and I had been casual friends for a long time although she was brilliant pianist. I was clearly not the musician she was, nor the singer I had hoped to be. She chose this distant Midwest college to study with a particular piano teacher. We started off as a team but during the year we became less close as she mourned being away from New York and its epicenter of culture and life. A tumultuous affair with a professor helped her decide to leave. After that year she moved back to the city and attended Julliard. Yes, she was that good. Meanwhile I had found some friends and forged new relationships, making a home in this alien but welcoming farm country.
I brought my forest picture with me from home and it traveled with me to the apartments I lived in during my three years at the college. I would gaze at it at night and in the morning, and wonder if I could traverse space and time and end up in that forest space, away from personal failures and challenges. But sometimes I simply relished the joy that seemed to be captured in the quiet image of trees in transition.
Years later I find myself walking through woods and I am transported back to that picture and the vast associations that come with it. I did not know it during my youth but autumn would be the season in which I lost first my mother (in a late September) and then my father, seven years later in October. It was indeed the season of departures, of change, for time to be achingly ephemeral — like those forest leaves. But I also welcomed two babies in the autumn, one in mid-September and three years later on Halloween. There was joy ahead as well.
Theories of personal identity challenge us to find that kernel of self that endures and makes one to be who they are. So much changes: our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts. We move from the naivete of one’s first year on college to the person who has lived decades: loved, lost, raised children, changed careers, but always through the context of the circle of seasons.
When the trees around me burst into color in October and November that artistic image appears before me. How interesting that art can help us see the world around us in ways we might miss without it. I still will gaze up at a certain sky with pale blue and floating clouds and think “Fragonard.”
As I tumble back into my past, I recollect that cardboard depiction of the empty forest which hauntingly beckons me to enter. For a moment I span past and present and recollect my college roommate, Jane and other friends from that time not thought of in many years: Jim, Roger, Ed, Mark, Becky, Assen, Jeanie — now all ghosts who live lives far apart from mine and who have probably forgotten me altogether — which is as it should be. We move on. But a flash memory: I recall sitting in my office on a rainy day, years after college, choosing not to attend the funeral of a professor to whom I turned for attention during my years in college. As the trees rustle around me, I regret that decision.
And so I weave connections between the woods before me and the images from my past.
In my memories I am easily transported back to reflect on my earlier self and the kernel of continuity captured by the image of the forest in autumn, that cardboard depiction and the woods before me. Autumn sings around me and I hear the echoes of those I loved, and lost in the myriad of dazzling trees, in that enchanted forest called “one’s life.” We are all wandering through that magical autumn forest, trying to find… something. And hoping that we find it before the last leaf falls.
