October 2

Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

— Wallace Stevens

It’s gotten hot again, as I feared. Leaves aren’t changing and it doesn’t feel at all like autumn. I can’t even wear a sports jacket to the school where I teach, because the building gets too hot during the day. I associate September and October with cool days, cool nights — a sense of change and transformation. Now, with the exception of a brief respite last weekend, there is nothing but heat; perpetual summer. It is disgusting and frightening, but more than that, it is spiritually stultifying; destructive for the eye, the skin, lungs, the mind. In the last decade, we have gone from the introduction of smartphones, to the total addiction to smartphones; similarly — we have gone from having relatively normal seasons, to strange, wild, irrational seasons; and nobody really talks about either transformation: we’ve allowed the death of nature, and the death of the soul (and these two deaths are linked) to become normalized. I write about it everyday. Still —I realize — writing has no practical power. Nature’s fever doesn’t break because we ask it to; leaves don’t change, the seasons don’t kick into motion because they wish they would. At this point, I write to mourn, not to change anyone’s minds; policies; lifestyles. We only get a limited number of springs and falls in our lives — 60, 70, 80, if we’re lucky — and there’s nothing, now, that we can do, to get this one back.