Great cycles

I arrived in New York in the early fall. The fall in American has always been somthing very special to me. It is one of the two natural phenomenon in the northern hemisphere that have always stirred me most. The other, of course, is the spring in England. Great as my love is for my own part of Africa and my tendency to set whatever it offers above all else in the world I had long since to admit to myself that it is not equipped to rehearse the annual progression through time of all living, growing and even inanimate things as well as it is ordered in England and America. We have nothing that can measure up to the stature of an English spring, dressing up a naked world for the festival of summer.

We have nothing so awesome of the fire of autumn sweeping through the great maple forsts of America, stripping their leaves from them in tongues of flame until they stand naked and penitent before the reckoning we call winter. It is a moment always full of a profound and natural sanctity for me, when the earth around about me becomes like an antique temple wherein this configuration, aflame and aflicker among the trees, accomplishes the final metamorphosis that fir did for the dead in those archaic places of the great forgotten mysteries, removing what was permanent, true and imperishable could accompany the spirit that once invested it on the journey to whatever lies beyond the here and the now.