Dead leaves

Fall arrived this weekend. Last week it was still scorching late Indian summer, with a threat of Santa Ana winds and wildfires. Then suddenly it changed. It was spectacularly beautiful this weekend, with clouds scudding overhead, picturesque white-caps dotting the ocean, and a coolness sufficient to drive me finally out of my summer uniform of shorts and Hawaiian shirts to jeans and a sweater. The light seems more pale and yellowed than it did last week, as the sun continues its southward slant, and today there just seemed to be a stillness in the air and in the crowds on the street.

I generally enjoy the transition to crispness and the shortening days, but this year I just feel melancholy. Autumn eases us to days of dark and cold, of change and death and loss. Another year draws a close, another birthday looms ahead. I'm feeling very blue these days, depressed by work burdens and by aspirations unreached and now unreachable. "I coulda been a contenda", an internal Marlon Brando voice protests, knowing that the chance is gone, fallen like the leaves. The darkness comes. I am in my Matthew Arnold place:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.