Saturday, January 03, 2004
SEASONAL AESTHETICS
Here in temperate America, the immediate post-holiday period is the first time all season that you really notice how cruel, how desiccated, how monochromatically brown the landscape has become. Prior to this point we've hung everything with bright, glowing, sparkly things; when they're abruptly removed, the reality hits us.
The natural tendency, I think, is to depress over the bleakness of it fall. If the change of seasons happened, say, every few thousand years or so instead of every year it would--like the sunset in Isaac Asimov's story "Nightfall"--drive people mad. People would think the world was ending.
Here in temperate America, the immediate post-holiday period is the first time all season that you really notice how cruel, how desiccated, how monochromatically brown the landscape has become. Prior to this point we've hung everything with bright, glowing, sparkly things; when they're abruptly removed, the reality hits us.
The natural tendency, I think, is to depress over the bleakness of it fall. If the change of seasons happened, say, every few thousand years or so instead of every year it would--like the sunset in Isaac Asimov's story "Nightfall"--drive people mad. People would think the world was ending.
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