Detail Diary, Vol #22

Equilibrating my seasonal inner ear

October 2024

Dear friend,

This year, the onset of autumn put me in an existential frame of mind. Last year, summer was so long and oppressive that autumn was nothing but a relief. This year, seasons have been wobbly, and I was somehow not prepared for the first leaf-turnings. They came without my consent. Autumn is precious and fleeting, so having it flame up before my inner ear of time-season equilibrium has caught up felt almost like a loss. Or perhaps it was more of a memento mori.

At the same time, this being my second autumn in Grenoble, the recurrence of details I documented last year in my Detail Diary—albiet two weeks earlier in the year—was sort of eerie, at first. I know that this is what seasons do, this is what seasons are for, carrying us through familiar patterns just distant enough to be fresh again—but my close recording had perhaps fixed certain details a little too crisply, reinforcing my sense of time collapsing on itself.

However, by mid-October, my inner ear settled. And autumn continued. Instead of worrying that the brilliance of the Liquidambar tree outside my office must be somehow cheapened by recurring so nearly exactly the same, I was moved almost to tears by the abundnace of witnessing it again. I watched fondly the rapid lighting of the beacons in the twin tuliptrees across the way, then walked over and got to know their dying leaves more minutely than I did last year. I remembered that there are always, always more Details to learn. Especially in ever-changing autumn.

So you will see recurring images here: the tuliptrees, the Liquidambar, the Japanese maple, the fruiting parasitic fungi, the errant bike tire left in the arboretum, the frog pond, the river, the sky.

(By the way, the rooks have just returned; the starlings have not, at least not to me, not yet.)

Read on for the Details…

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For an introduction to my Detail Diary, see here, or peruse past volumes.

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More of this hike here

More of this hike here

More of this museum here

Last year’s version of autumn, if you’re curious:

A perusal of last November will show how different the seasonal compass is this year; the tulip trees are still partially yellow on November 20, and this year they were almost bare by October 20.

And oh look, I wrote about cycles then, too.