“It gets cold here in late September”—I dont remember the rest of the song anymore. It was the autumn of 1999, probably around late September or early October. The place: the main cafeteria at the University of Washington, Seattle. I had just moved there to start graduate school in applied mathematics. I was quite happy to be in the coffee capital of the US, where everyday was a battle to see if you could restrain yourself from spending too much on coffee. The cafeteria had musicians come in and play. I remember this woman’s voice, though I have long forgotten her face. “It gets cold here in late September” was the refrain, and for a reason unknown to me it has stuck in my mind for the last nine years. It’s the way that it was sung–the fragility of a girl folkie’s voice–that somehow mesmerizes you. Obviously there was more than just metereological iufnromation being conveyed: it is the sense of passing, the sense of the seasons changing. The poignancy is in the way that it’s stated, so simply, almost obliquely, like a passing remark, said by a woman standing by an open window, pulling a sweater out of her closet and onto her body. That summer, I had taken an extension class in songwriting. From then until now, I’ve written many songs, but none of have been like that song. They are sometimes plaintive, but much more heart on your sleeve. “It gets cold here in late September”, on the other hand, is so much more rich than the lyrics that I have written. Somehow, for me at least, it just captures and explains much more about life than anything that I’ve ever written.
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Autumn has always been my favorite season, and a season as good as this demands that you know where to spend it. As much as I love my second hometown of Irvine, California, autumn is really wasted in the coastal areas of southern California. The deciduous forest areas of New Jersey, where I grew up, is where the seeds of my autumn mythologies were planted. Who doesn’t remember dashing twenty meters and long jumping into a pile of wet leaves. That was the reward I received for helping my father rake the leaves. It was tedious work–at least that’s how I would understand it now, in my early 30s, having had a few years of tedious work under my belt. Of course, it wasn’t, and holds out, to the present me, the promise that mechanical, repetitive work–done in the spirit of loving toil–can be meaningful, and indeed can heal. Living in the cement, glass, and steel menagerie that is Shanghai, I can’t help but wonder if I will, at some point, have the courage or wherewithal to break free.
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After all, autumn is about sensations: how the wind feels, the chill on your skin and bones. The way that the steam from a coffee feels under your nose and the way that it warms your hands. The way that coffee tastes as it goes down your throat, the way you feel a slight spring in the step after sluicing your neurons with more caffeine. A rolled cigarette, leaning against a car, because whatever needs to be done can be done five minutes from now. When I was working at the Interlake Childcare center in Seattle, I remember taking the kids–most just three or four years old–to nearby Woodland Park to play. I remember thinking how young just being with them made me feel, and I remember how beautiful those wooded areas in Seattle were. It was so easy to escape the city, even though by Shanghai standards, Seattle isn’t that “urban” in the first place.
The northwest is a place that truly does justice to the season.
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But so do New York and Boston. Autumn is, in my mind, intertwined with the idea of flanerie: seemingly aimless meandering, but not the kind that is done out of sheer boredom, but rather its opposite–the will to continually traverse the urban environment comes from the need and desire to truly understand it. New York, Boston, and Seattle are all great cities for exploring in the autumn. You are completely anonymous and yet part of this great urban drama. Someone–God?–is coordinating the movements of all these people to and from the subway stations.
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Autumn is particularly suited to reflection and its more flighty cousin, reverie. In the summer there is no reprieve from the sweaty and itchy present. The winter is similar, at least if you are far from enough from the equator for it to matter. The spring is a season of excitement, a reprieve or a reward for making it through the winter. The spring is a bit too outward looking and involves too much positive thinking for my tastes. The spring is about sweeping out the old and bringing in the new, it’s entrepreneurial, energetic, driven, passionate. During the autumn I wear the same clothes that I would wear in the spring–but the mood is completely different. The autumn in some ways, is a slowing, is a coming to terms, is a reckoning, an internal audit, an personal inquest. Blustery autumn days spent drifting through Capitol Hill in Seattle, North Beach in San Fran, Telegraph Ave in Berkeley, the North End in Boston–places where there are, yes, lots of tourists, but where there is still a a bit of an old world feel. These are eminently walkable places. I don’t know of many places in Shanghai that can compare. There is life in the streets of Shanghai, but not in the same way. Perhaps other Asian cities would do better in this regard. There are areas of Shanghai, such as the old town in Huangpu, where you can indulge in some urban flanerie amid some older buildings.
You walk, and the wind blows. You try to bundle up and protect yourself, but in reality, it’s the wind that is helping you think. It drives out the distractions that you experience in the other seasons.
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So autumn, then, is about a certain clarity. Moments of illumination (what St. Augustine considered the true mechanism of learning), micro-epiphanies, ersatz revelations, temporary fixes, flashes of contentment: this would a partial description of the my mental meteorology in this season.
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You get out the jackets and pullovers, you examine the sweaters: the last time you wore them was in the spring. Naturally, the clothes are embedded with memories. Old jackets you never throw away remind you of the day you bought them. A girl was with you, you hadn’t been in the market for a jacket, she convinced you. Said you looked good in it. You turn around, examining yourself in the mirror. She thinks you look good–evidence that she loves you. You are pleased even though you know, should anyone have put the question to you directly, that she loved you. But you are glad to hear it again, in this small oblique way, again. A puckish grin, and then you’re fishing for your credit card. Reference points in your memory: you naturally think back. You cast the net far and wide enough in your memory, you’ll be amazed by what you find. You ensconce yourself in the sadness this produces–but the autumn is good for that. It is the essential alone-time of your year. Autumn provides the luxury of reverie.
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I look forward to wearing the black jacket again. It reminds me of spring in Paris, when it protected me against the rain. Now I wish that I was back in Paris. No doubt the parks and the cemeteries are beautiful this time of year. No doubt that reading a book with a cup of coffee in a quiet spot by the Seine would be as close to heaven as I could possibly get.
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I write this because I cannot explain this to my friends living here in Shanghai, in words, how I feel about this season. One has to recalibrate, constantly, that threshold beyond which things are better left unsaid, better written privately than emoted publicly. I won’t bother anymore. Talking, for the most part, is no good–you are always on the defensive. You can’t overstep bounds, kill conversations, ruin the flow. But in writing you are free, free to burrow yourself as deeply as you like. Turn away, pet down your pen and shut off your computer, and you can always find your way back to real life. Yet every episode of real life brings with fresh and unexpected associations. There is no defying the logic of your mind, not in this season.
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Flanerie is often considered a solitary activity: yet would it not be wonderful to have a companion? Spring is the season for lovers? I think not. Autumn is, for me, the season of romance. I imagine a woman that I have not yet met. I imagine that each place that we duck into–each subway station, each cafe, each market–every nook and cranny has contained within it the potential for intimacy. One day I will take her to Woodland Park, and Green Lake, and we will walk hand in hand for hours. There might be a fog that shrouds everything, everything except a piercing green Starbucks sign, which we will complain about as we enter and order our coffees. And then, our hands warmed and our cheeks still ruddy, we will venture out, to wander some more. That is, I think, the closest that I could ever come to happiness. And yet I have not found that woman, or perhaps I had her and let her go.
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My birthday is September 1. The beginning of a new school year. In the rhythmanalysis of my life, September is therefore quite crucial. September is my period of beginnings, much more than the new years of either western solar or eastern lunar calendars. Performance and accomplishments are benchmarked against the same time in years past. This is Day 1 of the Year 1. There is a resurgence of pressure–to do something by year’s end (I know that contradicts what I just said about the relative insignificance of the new year), and get some things done before I grow a year older. Usually around this time I am still counting the days since my birthday. A month will have passed by tomorrow. That is one-twelfth of the year, gone already. It scares me. The stakes are so high. They always have been.
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There is no sense of urgency because at 31, you still feel young. There hasn’t been enough visible or sensible deterioration of mental or physical appearance, faculties, and abilities to warrant any alarm. You are changing, of course, but you are as you always have been. And so you dawdle and let one-twelfth of each year slip by you, unnoticed.
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In just two months’ time, the temperatures will drop significantly. The cats will disappear under my covers. I will have to be careful not to jump on my bed like I did on those piles of leaves with reckless abandon, not unless I want to take pictures of cats in body casts.
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I will find that woman, some day. And then we will worry about finding an appropriate place to spend an idyllic autumn. And I will write a song like that one. I don’t think I will ever find out who that person was. An anonymous folkie lugging around a decent guitar and some cheap amps, someone stapling documents for a living, someone that can write things so beautiful that it disturbs you to know how easy it is to miss someone like her in the crowd, and mistake her for one of them. The dehumanized crowd–you are victim yes, but don’t forget that you are a perpetrator, too.
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September 30, 2008. Shanghai.
