“It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened.”
—C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Whenever I listen to people describing Autumn, there are differing opinions but similar observations. Some dread the season because it means the ending of the vibrant summer, others because it predicts and prepares the way for the desolate months of winter. Conversely, many look forward to Fall with anticipation and delight because of the atmosphere it creates. Through natural rhythms, Autumn reaps the bounties of summer and beckons the natural world to die away and enter into its winter slumber.

It is as if Autumn is hung between life and death creating the axis of the seasons and enveloping us in a beautiful melancholy through the rhythms of nature. It touches on the deepest parts of our soul and stirs in us the intense longing called joy.

Nature was described by the medievals as a book to be understood and loved. Saint Augustine, a major influence on medieval thought, wrote: “Well, as a matter of fact there is a certain great big book, the book of created nature. Look carefully at it top and bottom, observe it, read it.” To Augustine, nature was an embodiment of the logos—the Word as recorded in the central text of Western Civilization, the Bible.

For Christians, the Word is Jesus Christ, God taking human form and entering into creation, making humans “complete in Him.” This completion is what Saint John the apostle is drawing on with his oft-repeated phrase “your joy will be complete.” Joy comes in moments where our souls touch completion through connection to the logos, or the Word, in nature.

This is what medieval scholar C.S. Lewis relates in his autobiography Surprised by Joy. Lewis describes how one of his first experiences of transcendent joy came from an intense connection to Autumn, awakened by reading of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter. This children’s book takes place in England’s Lake District during the peak of Fall, featuring a merry band of red squirrels and an old no-nonsense owl.

In preparation for the coming Winter, the squirrels begin preparing by collecting nuts, obeying the rhythms of the natural cycle of seasons. However, little Nutkin in his naughtiness is not obedient to this rhythm and idly pokes fun at Old Mr. Brown the owl instead of doing his part. The story reminds the reader of mythological tales, like when the squirrels recognize Mr. Brown as the power of the island and, out of respect, give him offerings to obtain his goodwill. But Squirrel Nutkin “who had no respect,” refuses to treat these powers with reverence and saucily meddles with the forceful owl until eventually provoking him. Like Arachne, Nutkin becomes humbled by an encounter with death, living the rest of his life marked without a tail for his folly.

The charm of Squirrel Nutkin is how the story captures the spirit of a season. Literary editor Janet Adam Smith wrote:

Beatrix Potter did more than mirror a region in her pictures; she supplied the genius loci in her enchanting animals. Is it absurdly fanciful to think of them as the English equivalents of fauns and nymphs, whose legends express the sentiment of a scene or landscape?

The genius loci is the protective spirit of a place in Greek and Roman mythology. Such characters as Old Mr. Brown express the same mythological connection that enchanted C.S. Lewis in other sources. Through her characters and landscapes, Potter personified the living, moving spirit of a place and season. C.S. Lewis described it as entering into “another dimension.”

This same other dimension revealed through Autumn is described in John Keats’ poem, “To Autumn.” One Sunday on a walk, John Keats observed the sublime joy of experiencing Autumn and decided to compose a poem on the subject. In this work, John Keats gives a poetic description, simply going through the features of the season such as “apples,” “moss’d cottage-trees,” “gourd[s],” and “hazel shells.” Through this description, the sublime suddenly speaks to our souls, and we are filled again with that intense longing called joy.

How do these descriptions summon this desire in us? Keats began the poem by describing nature “conspiring” with the sun “to load and bless,” beginning the introduction to Autumn with a description of fullest life. The poem then goes on to describe the personification of the season:

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

This description of wind, an unseeable force rocking between blowing boisterously and dying down, always moving past us, introduces a more desolate note. The poem begins to address the occurrence of death in Autumn.

Keats, seeking the season of new life amidst the decay around him, penetrates the poem with the word Spring. He asks the reader, “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?” using a rhetorical device called ubi sunt, a meditation on the nature of life and death.

Quickly, Keats calms his own cries entreating the reader to “Think not of them.” Through this one statement, Keats is submitting to the inevitability of the change of life into death. Life and death are simultaneously embodied, for a brief time, in the season of Autumn. This compels the reader to stand still for a moment, suspended between two inevitabilities which have seamlessly become one process.

As Andrew Klaven wrote about the poem: “Keats sees the process of life and death here as one process, life-and-death in a timeless Now. And when he sees it fully and enters it fully, it becomes personified: it has a human face.”

This moment of suspension is like the moment Jesus Christ hung on the cross, suspended between heaven and earth, experiencing the fullness of death while bringing into the world the truest form of life. It is the moment of the burning bush, which, in Andrew Klaven’s words, “contains life-and-death in a single eternal process, the growing bush never consumed by the destructive fire that never dies. Like the autumn, the bush, when Moses looks at it, reveals itself to be a person: I AM.”

If the medievals are right, and Jesus Christ and nature both embody the Word, if the cycle of the seasons are the patterns that appear in our lives and the greater truths in the universe, then to be connected to Autumn is to touch the completion we will find when we die and finally live. If we submit to this process of seasons and rest in the melancholic fullness of Autumn instead of wishing it were Spring or dreading Winter, if we are obedient to the rhythms of the natural world, unlike Squirrel Nutkin, we may know joy and be led into another dimension.

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