Emerson on the Singular Enchantment of Indian Summer (and a Better Term for This Liminal Season Today) – The Marginalian

For all the singular magic of autumn, there is also a singular enchantment to those unbidden days in it when summer seems to make a brief and bright return — as if to assure us that time is not linear but planar, that life will always recompense loss, that in the liminal we find the immanent and in the ephemeral the eternal.

No one has captured that enchantment more vividly than Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) in a rhapsodic entry from his journal penned one late and luminous October day in his thirties.

Emerson writes:

On this wonderful day when heaven and earth seem to glow with magnificence, and all the wealth of all the elements is put under contribution to make the world fine, as if Nature would indulge her offspring, it seemed ungrateful to hide in the house. Are there not dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great thoughts, and Egypt and India look from their eyes.

He would later draw on this journal entry for the opening passage of his landmark book-length essay Nature (public library), considered the founding document of Transcendentalism (a term his visionary friend Elizabeth Peabody coined). Following a short poem, the essay begins:

There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely.

The phrase “Indian summer” entered the lexicon in Emerson’s lifetime, peaked a century and a half later, and has since been falling out of use in the slow repair work of culture. But we have failed to replace it with a new term for those golden echoes of summer that harmonize the hymn of letting go that is fall. Perhaps “the halcyons” can do.

Complement with ornithologist and wildlife ecologist J. Drew Lanham on autumn and the sensual urgency of aliveness and Colette on the autumn, in nature and in life, as a beginning rather than a decline, then revisit Emerson on how to trust yourself, how to live with presence, how we become our most authentic selves.