Autumn

Autumn is maybe the most obvious season, though it always meets me when I'm not looking.

I know it's autumn when everyday I feel less and less socially adept or socially engaged. I start to feel a little afraid that I'm going so inward that all my previous outwardness seems outdated, no longer me. I pace myself by my own internal time, as if I'm hanging one retrospective after another in my own little museum, and then walk around looking at what I've hung. I see how long I've spent being one way--extroverted--as opposed to the way I am now--introverted.

Everything then seems both incomplete, of having no chance of becoming complete, and of being finished forever. I'm thinking here of the concept of negative capability as identified by the poet of autumn, John Keats: that the trick is in living in a state of incompletion and uncertainty, to hold my attention there as if it is as real as earth, air, water. But I can do this for only so long, only minutes at a time, though when I'm doing it it seems like I've been doing it my whole life.

If my body was a leaf, it would be falling. But I don't really feel like going anywhere. I want to stay home and read book after book, I want to learn all I can about the past before it's too late.