The Idea of Autumn
This is my first time at trying to post from an iPad. Last weekend I shut my six-year-old MacBook lid and went out, and when I returned the hard drive was gone, vanished completely. It was not even detectable in disk utility (for those who know what that is) and Genius Bar guy couldn’t detect it either. So, I am getting a new hard drive installed thanks to a geeky friend (strangely even genius bar guy thought this was worth doing) but I also thought I’d seize the excuse to buy an iPad, which is all still a lot less expensive than a new MacBook.
But all that aside, this morning I posted a photo of one of my flaming Japanese Maples on Instagram (you can see my Instagram below) and referenced what CS Lewis called ‘the Idea of Autumn’. Then I realised I had never actually shared that part I’d Surprised by Joy here, was which is an oversight given the connection to Sehnsucht. So here it is:
“It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? . . . Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. The second glimpse came through Squirrel Nutkin; through it only, though I loved all the Beatrix Potter books . . . it administered the shock, it was a trouble. It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened; and as before, the experience was one of intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire (that was impossible – how can one possess Autumn?) but to reawake it. And in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension’ . . . [it was] an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy . . . anyone who has experienced it will want it again . . . I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.”
~ C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy