Autumn

It is now two years since my year of age carried the prefix "thirty". Never one to take things philosophically, I have felt the influence and intimations of this world in several ways. Though I am fully aware that in health and spirits I am in no way different from what I was at the age of twenty-nine, this notion of "thirty" hangs over my head. It is like the opening of a parasol that casts one in dark shade, or like the tearing off of the page that marks the first day of autumn from the calendar: although the sun's power has not diminished, and the thermometer's reading has not dropped, one thinks of it only as fading strength or swan song, or as the prelude to frost and leaf-fall; from now on the natural world has shifted to the autumn season.

In truth my mood over the last two years has been of a kind to harmonize or blend with autumn. This is a change. In years gone by I only hankered after spring. I loved willows and swallows. Especially the young willow wands newly tinged with gosling yellow. I named my lodging "Little Willow Hut", and did lots of paintings of willows and swallows, and also cut slender willow shoots and mounted them on cartridge paper as different styles of eyebrow, imagined the faces that would go with those eyebrows, and sketched in eyes, nose and mouth below them. At the first signs of spring in those days, around the end of the first month by the lunar calendar, when I saw tiny knobs breaking the smooth lines of the willow branches, with a suggestion of green that seemed to vanish close up, my heart was filled with delirious joy. But this joy immediately turned to anxiety, as if I was always telling myself: "Spring has come! Don't let it go by! Quick, think how to entertain it, enjoy it, keep it with you for ever." I had been genuinely moved by such lines as "The golden hour, the beautiful scene, alas the ravages of time"; I took to heart the lesson of our forebears when they sighed over spring passing neglected. Now it was in my hands, I vowed it should not go by in vain! When the Qingming Festival, that time of deepest sorrowing for our forefathers, came around, my anxiety was intensified. I always wanted to make that day an occasion, so as to render fitting tribute to the season. I planned to write poems, do paintings, or go on a binge or an excursion. Although most of those plans were not carried out, or if carried out proved entirely fruitless, resulting adversely in drunken stupor, disturbances, and unhappy memories, yet I was never discouraged, and always felt spring was lovable.

To my mind spring was the only season. The other three were either the preparation for spring, or the interval when spring was awaited. I completely ignored their existence and meaning. I was especially indifferent to autumn, because summer succeeded spring, and I could see it as spring taken to excess; winter preceded spring, and so could be seen as making ready for spring; but autumn had no connection at all with spring, and so had no place in my mind.

In the two years since my year of age reached the start of autumn on life's calendar my mindset has had an entirely different orientation: it has become autumn too. But my state is different orientation: it has become autumn too. But my state is different from what it was, I do not feel in autumn the extravagant joy and anxiety of former days. I just feel when autumn comes round that my state of mind is perfectly attuned to it. Not only has that joy and anxiety left me, I am often drawn by autumn wind, autumn rain, autumn colors and shades, into melting into the season, and losing for a time my own identity. What's more, my attitude to spring is not the indifference that I formerly felt for autumn. I now detest spring. Whenever the myriad signs of spring appear, and I see the beauty pageant of flowers, the bustle of bees and butterflies, and everywhere the mad rush of plants, insects and other things to multiply and procreate, it seems to me that nothing could better illustrate the vulgarity, greed, shamelessness and senselessness of this world. Particularly when in the first flush of spring I see the hint of green knobs on the willow branches, and the speckling of red petals on the peach trees, I find it both ridiculous and pathetic. I want to wake up a flower bud and tell it, "So, you've come too to replay that old refrain! I've seen with my own eyes countless ancestors of your being born like you, and striving each and every one to outdo the others in splendor; not one of them hasn't withered and turned to dust. What is the point of you too repeating that old refrain? Born into sin, what does the future hold? You'll drink and posture and play the flirt, and what you'll get for your trouble is being trampled and crushed and broken off, the same fate as all your ancestors suffered!"

To face facts, someone who has welcomed and seen off thirty-odd springs gets thoroughly fed up with the business of flowers: his senses are numbed, his passion is cooked. He will not be bewitched like a young virgin seeing the world for the first time by the magic of flowers, and praise them, sigh over them, take pity on them, mourn them. For of all things under the sun there is not one that escapes the law of flowering and fading, growing and decaying, living and dying, being and not being. Past history amply proves this point; we need not say more. Countless poets down the ages have written reams of verses, all like, to express their sorrow at the passing of spring and their regret over the fading of flowers. This aping of each other is detestable. If I were to waste words myself on the subject of birth and ripening, death and extinction, it would be to say that birth and ripening are not worth mentioning; my praise goes to death and extinction. Compared with the greed, stupidity and spinelessness of the former, how modest, enlightened and dignified is the attitude of the latter! My preference for autumn over spring is based on that.

Natsume Suseki said this when he was thirty: "Twenty years into life I learned the value of being alive; at twenty-five I learned that where there is light there must be darkness; now at thirty I know even better that where there is much light there is also much darkness, and when joy is abundant sorrow is also heavy." I now deeply sympathize with this view. At the same time I feel that this is not the only facet of being thirty; a more particular one is the sense of death. When young people are thwarted in love they like to talk about death and dying, but that is only knowledge of the thing called death, no the sense of it. It is similar to not being able to sense what it is like to sit round a winter fire huddled in blankets when one is drinking iced drinks and fanning oneself on a summer's day. Even we who have known thirty-odd changes of seasons could not in the recent keatwave get the sense of a nice crisp dawn. Things like crisp dawns, winter fires and huddling in blankets are just abstract data in the mind of people in the middle of summer: they merely know that such things lie in the future, but cannot experience the sensation of them. One has to wait for autumn, when the broiling sun has displayed its might and is gradually receding and flesh which has been swelled with sweat gradually draws in, when the wearing of unlined clothes inclines one to shiver and flannel is pleasant to the touch, for the knowledge of crisp dawns, winter fires and huddling in blankets to gradually enter the realm of experience and become sensation.

After my year of age reached the start of autumn, the most special state of mind it gave me was indeed this sensation of "death". How shallow were my thoughts prior to that! I believed that spring could be our constant companion, that man could stay forever young, and actually never thought of death. And I believed that the meaning of human life was only in living, and my own life was most meaningful; it seemed I couldn't die. Only now, with the benefit of the illumination of autumn rays, and under the benign influence of the spirit of death, have I comprehended that life's sweetness and bitterness, joys and sorrows are an old refrain that has been played billions of times under our skies, and are nothing to treasure. I seek only peaceful passage through and release from this life. To make a comparison, if a person suffers from madness, it is pointless to try to make anything of his confusion and delusions: one hopes only to rid him of his sickness.

As I lay down my pen, I see from my western window black clouds filling the sky, a flash of lightning on the horizon, and hear a faint rumble of thunder. A sudden shower of autumn rain mixed with hail pours down. Oh! So few days after the start of autumn, while the autumn mind is still young and green, it turns out that such discordance occurs: it scares me!