Seasons

All my life, when reading a work of fiction, I always tend to gloss over descriptions of seasons – specifically of seasons changing. On a conceptual level I always kind of understood the intention behind it: the transition into winter is often used to invoke dread or melancholy creeping in, while summer is used to invoke life in full swing and – as an added bonus – vacations.

‘When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.’ (Hemingway, A Moveable Feast)

At a mental level I understood it, but it’s always an experience that was absent from my life. There’s not really much in the way of seasons in the corner of the globe I grew up in. In the Philippines, it rains in the summer, and it’s only slightly less hot in December. There’s nothing around to signal the passing of time: no dead trees suddenly bursting into life after months of snow, and whatever foliage hasn’t been stripped from Manila’s concrete hellscape just stays green from September to November. (I wonder what that has made of us, as a people.)

This reminds me of a problem that was posed to us one day in third year high school Physics. God help me if I can remember the problem, but it involved something called turpentine. I had no idea what turpentine is, and neither our professor or the textbook where he pulled it from bothered to explain, but in the course of answering the problem, I kind of just took it for granted that turpentine is a kind of liquid substance and carried on solving for volumes, specific heat, and whatnot. In the same way, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, when Jordan says, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall,” I kind of just take it for granted that things get crisp in the fall – more crisp, apparently, than it tends to be in the summer.

Right now, I’m on my second year as a doctorate student in Japan and I’ve witnessed a full cycle of Japan’s four seasons. It’s October first, and already on my weekly runs to the grocery, I can see the leaves on the trees outside turning from a lively green to a fiery red. They aren’t all quite red yet, instead it looks as though every tree is bearing the same kind of pointy, orange-red fruit. By the end of the month the fruits would have overrun the tree, and those that die and fall to the ground would be crisp.

Another thing I find amusing is to keep track of how noisy the frogs and the crickets tend to be in our neighborhood (we live right next to a rice field, not quite the urban jungle that is Tokyo or Osaka central) in the summer, but they all go mum once winter comes in. I remember Holden Caulfield, asking a cab driver what happens to the ducks when the pond freezes over in winter. Everything gets quiet in winter. The air, being colder, feels heavier – weighted.

I don’t have any deep philosophical comments to put in here, not that I’ve ever been in possession of such profound moments. I only meant to remark on how much of an experience it really is, to live even for a few years in a different country. The new culture is an obvious point of divergence, but there are also these subtle moments that make you realize the variety of human life that exists, most of it ignorant to the particular one we’re living. As I’ve always put it in my own private diaries and unpublished story drafts – there is so much of the world, and so little of us.