The Idea of Autumn
In this episode we discuss "the idea of autumn," as described by C.S. Lewis, the Danish idea of Hygge, or "coziness," and the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, the beauty to be found in impermanent things. We also geek out about Legend of the Five Rings, and Augustus Gloop gets an honorable mention for some reason.
Theme music: “Splanchnics Riff” composed and performed by Clare T. Walker.
Photo credit: Autumn Tree by Clare T. Walker
Timestamps
8:40 The phrase, “the idea of autumn,” comes from Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis.
9:45 Sehnsucht is a German word that means “inconsolable longing or yearning,” or “intensely missing something.” Lewis calls this feeling “Joy,” or “rays of sunlight piercing through clouds.
11:05 C.S. Lewis grew up in a house of books. His first experience of “the idea of autumn” came from reading Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.
15:35 Hygge is a Danish word that describes things that are cozy. Simplifying your life, not by getting rid of things, but having select cozy things and experiences. Warm blankets, warm drinks, houseplants, handmade artwork in the home.
18:55 Senescence- the process of aging, or the state of being old. Autumn exemplifies this. The leaves are aging and falling off, winter/death is coming.
20:55 In The Lord of the Rings, the elves are in a state of senescence, preparing to leave Middle Earth. In the movies, particularly, this is exemplified by autumnal trees in Rivendell.
22:40 Wabi-sabi is a Japanese word, a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. For example, autumn leaves are beautiful because they are impermanent.
25:35 If you crack a pot, you can repair it using kinsuki, or “gold joinery,” a Japanese art in which pottery can be repaired using lacquer and gold. Treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Hannah tells a story about a friend who was burned as a child and uses her scars to teach young women about positive body image.
29:30 Mono-no-aware (another Japanese term) means, “the pathos of things,” “an empathy toward things,” or “a sensitivity to ephemera.” It describes the ability to be aware of the transience of things. Clare explains a little bit about the game mechanics of Legend of the Five Rings, and how it relates to mono-no-aware.
Additional Resources:
● The Little Book of Hygge, by Meik Wiking (Link takes you to our Bookshop.org store. Scroll down to “Simplify…Simplify”)
● The YouTuber and bullet journal artist Plant-Based Bride creates one of her monthly setups based on the concept of hygge: November 2019 Bullet Journal Setup
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Transcript:
Clare: Hello everybody. Welcome to Splanchnics, the society for the preservation of literature, the arts, numinosity culture, humor, nerdiness, inspiration, creativity, and storytelling.
Hannah: That sounded right to me. I think it was right.
Clare: Today we're talking about the idea of autumn.
(Intro music)
Clare: We are very human. Welcome back. We're going to talk about the idea of autumn today. Today is the second-to-last day of October, and we've wanted to do this episode about autumn because it's my favorite season.
Hannah: It's mine too.
Clare: I love it. You know, everything. The leaves… And of course, what do we wake up to this morning, but snow. The first snow of the year on the second-to-last day of October.
Hannah: I'm very upset. I don't want to drive home in the snow.
Clare: I couldn't believe it. I remember telling you kids, I remember distinctly as a child, growing up around here, trick-or-treating in the snow sometimes. I don't think you guys ever had to do that. I don't know that we ever had snow on any of your Halloweens as kids.
Hannah: Do you know what I think of whenever you say, “I remember distinctly?”
Clare: What?
Hannah: The Raven. "Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak September."
Clare: Keep going.
Hannah: "...And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor." Yeah. I had to memorize that for school.
Clare: Yes, you did.
Hannah: Homeschooling!
Clare: That was awesome. We're going to talk about autumn when there's three inches of snow on the ground.
Hannah: Yup. My car is a death trap. That's going to be fun.
Clare: No, no. You'll be fine.
Hannah: I'm usually fine.
Clare: But before we go into our discussion about autumn, what we love about it, the beauty of it, let's do our input-output report.
Hannah: Okay. I have been trying to actually read more. I picked up The Princess Bride and read it again, which was pretty delightful. I enjoyed it. The movie is so similar and so true to the book, and I love it.
Clare: It's a great movie. Was it a book first?
Hannah: Yeah, it was a book first by William Goldman, and then William Goldman wrote the screenplay, because he's a screenplay writer as well. He wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Anyway, I enjoyed it. It was a good fairy tale. A good escape. I loved it.
I've also been taking in [content] from movies/media/TV side of things. I finished watching Breaking Bad, and the day that I finished Breaking Bad, there were all these ads for El Camino, which is the movie that starts just after the season ends.
So I didn't have to wait at all. It's a movie that's more about Jesse Pinkman, who was Walter White's former student who became his partner in cooking meth and dealing the meth and everything.
It's sort of his own story about what happens to him. I really enjoyed it. There've been some criticisms about it where people said it was really slow paced.
It reminded me of No Country For Old Men because there [were] sort of these long, quiet scenes of stuff in the desert. It takes place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and it's in the desert. He's driving along. He's hiding out places. He's got a duffle bag full of cash. It just reminded me of No Country For Old Men, and I love that character too. He's my favorite character in the show, so I really liked that he had his own movie.
Clare: Excellent. What's the name of the movie again?
Hannah: El Camino.
Clare: El Camino. Good.
Hannah: It means "the road," I believe.
Clare: El camino royale. I'm sure there are lots of roads called El camino royale but the one I remember is the one in the San Francisco Bay area because we lived there for a while. Drove up and down it many times.
Hannah: I watched El Camino and I also watched the prequel series for Breaking Bad, which is called Better Call Saul. I binged it.
Clare: Wow!
Hannah: Yeah! I've done all of it now, so I'm done. That was pretty good, too. It was about the lawyer in that show. He's kind of a rogue, if I was going to talk D & D terms. He’s…what's the word? I'm thinking “sheisty” for some reason. He's kind of conniving.
That's it. He's kind of conniving and manipulative, and he's like, "We'll do this. It's not strictly legal, but…” Always positive. Always has a scheme. Kind of. It was fun. I really enjoyed it. That's me.
Clare: Okay. My input, I haven't been reading. I haven't been watching. What I've been doing is I've been bingeing Star Wars: Destiny…
Hannah: Shame. On. You.
Clare: …the way a crazed soccer fan watches the World Cup. It was the Star Wars Destiny world championships the weekend of October 18th, 19th, & 20th, so just recently. A week, week and a half ago. I was streaming it.
Hannah: Were you watching it live? (laughing)
Clare: Yes! I got up, I had my coffee and I was in my slippers and pajamas watching. You should should've seen me. I had the official Fantasy Flight Games stream up there,
and then there were some of the other Destiny content creators--you know, different people who just stream games. There were three or four other groups there, streaming. I have this window there, this window there, this window, this window. And I was looking at them and I would go to the game that I thought would be the most interesting to watch.
Hannah: You're insane!
Clare: It was bad. It was really fun though. I got to watch a lot of games of Destiny.
So that's my input.
Now, last time we were talking about output, what we've been working on. We've talked about what I was working on, but--I realized this after we got done talking--we forgot to do yours. What have you been working on? So let’s skip me and go to you.
Hannah: I didn't notice either. So, no worries. What have I been working on? I'm still working on my book. I have beta readers who were bugging me. They're saying they want my book because I asked them, "Do you want to read it?" and then I haven't finished it yet because that's just what I do. I agonize.
I've been working on costume design for Voices Found, which is my theater company in the Milwaukee area. They're doing Henry the Fifth, and it's a “Fallout-style” design. It's sort of like if the apocalypse happened during World War II. A Fallout design. We've got people with their fedoras and their trench coats and flak suits, gas masks. But then we've also got laser guns and stuff. So that's lots of fun.
Clare: Good. I want to go see that.
Hannah: It's going to be good.
Clare: Nice! Let's get into our topic. Our topic is the idea of autumn. Where does that phrase come from? That phrase is not original to me. That phrase comes from C.S. Lewis.
It comes from his book, Surprised by Joy. The reason that this came to mind is because he talks about the idea of autumn being one of the things that gives him the sense of what he calls Joy with a capital J. The background on this…
Hannah: (singing) “Oh-oh-joy! When you call me…"
Clare: Ah, that was nice.
Hannah: Thanks! It's a song that’s on the radio currently, so some people will get it.
Clare: I don't know. I haven't heard that.
Hannah: For some reason, I expected you to join me.
Clare: I just awkwardly sat there. Anyway. C.S. Lewis began with this: this German word, sehnsucht.
Hannah: In German it’s pronounced "zayn zucht."
Clare: Sehnsucht. People who are German speakers can rage on us on the internet here, in the comments below. It means inconsolable longing or yearning, or it can also mean intensely missing something. And it can be intensely missing something that you have experience of or something that you just long for, you intensely miss something in advance, kind of.
Lewis calls that feeling Joy. He calls it “stabs of joy.” And those things come upon you suddenly, just in your life, unasked for, unlooked for usually. He describes it as “rays of sunlight piercing through clouds.”
We have that a lot in the autumn: “rays of sunlight piercing through clouds.” He [Lewis] says there are a couple of different things in his life that made him aware of this sense, this sort of joy or sehnsucht, this longing for things.
There are a number of them, but I'll get to the one that I wanted to talk about. He grew up in a house of books. He says his father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. Again, a lot of these quotes that I'm saying are from Lewis's book Surprised by Joy. His favorite books as a child, were the E. Nesbitt books
(The Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Wishing Carpet) He also was a big fan of Gulliver's Travelsand then Beatrix Potter. He loved Beatrix Potter. He was reading Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkinwhen he felt that stab of desire again. He was struck by what he calls “the idea of autumn” and, "as before, the experience was one of intense desire, and one went back to the book not to gratify the desire. That was impossible. How can one possess autumn? But to reawaken it, to experience that longing and that joy of longing for something beautiful and good.”
Hannah: Squirrel Nutkin is the one that pissed off the owl and it bit his tail off, right?
Clare: Yes. But it's a very autumn-y book cause he's gathering nuts.
Hannah: Maybe it's an intense longing to have a tail again. You know, like we did when we were primates.
Clare: Our vestigial tail?
Hannah: Yeah. Longing for the vestigial tail.
Clare: Oh my gosh. I kind of doubt that.
Hannah: Are you sure? It sounds, it seems pretty solid to me.
Clare: Uh, no Hannah. I don't think so, but anyway!
The idea of autumn: I really connected with that because I love autumn as well. There are so many things about autumn that are evocative of sehnsucht and bringing these things up. I thought we could do a little word association: what is it about autumn that we enjoy? We went for a walk the other day. Do you remember we had a lot of intense rain the day before and we went for a walk and it was on one of those beautiful, perfect, clear, blue cloudless skies of autumn, sunny. It was warm-ish
Hannah: We had to take our coats off…
Clare: …while we were walking, but we needed them initially. And then the leaves were just beautiful on the trees.
Hannah: I love the ones that are the color of peaches.
Clare: We collected some leaves and we put them in our books when we got home. The leaves. The color--or the changing color--of the leaves is one thing I love about autumn.
Hannah: I think if we collected all the leaves that we have pressed into books, it would be a little embarrassing.
Clare: Well, I just love them so much.
Hannah: Me, too!
Clare: What else? So the leaves the leaves and pumpkin. Everything is pumpkin.
Hannah: Cider. I'm drinking apple cider today because I knew we were talking about autumn. It makes me think of autumn.
Hannah: Cozy sweaters and scarves and hats and gloves. I love them all.
Clare: Cozy. Here I am in my cozy fleece. Autumn going into winter is cozy.
Hannah: I should’ve brought my slippers down here like you did. My feet are freezing.
Clare: Are they?
Hannah: Yeah.
Clare: Whoops.
Hannah: I’m intermittently warming one with the other.
Clare: You can borrow my slippers. Here.
Hannah: Next time? Oh, are we going to share?
Clare: You can put my slippers on. Go ahead.
Hannah: Okay. Ooh. They’re still warm.
Clare: Yes, they’re warm from my own feet. You can give them back to me when my feet start to get cold.
Hannah: You’ve always taken care of me. From the moment I was conceived.
Clare: That’s true. So, the coziness. I was thinking about this: autumn and winter are cozy. You would never describe summer as cozy. Summer is expansive. You're out there.
Hannah: It's like an adventure.
Clare: You're not bundled up in clothes. You don’t keep the windows closed. The windows are open. You're wearing looser clothing. You're out there more. Out there going around on vast expanses of water, swimming or boating or something like that. In winter, you don't do that. In autumn and winter, you draw in and you put a sweater on and you wrap yourself in your blankets and you drink a hot drink.
Hannah: There's this thing that's going around this phenomena. It's the new “simplifying your life.” It's a Danish word: hygge.
Clare: Okay. I've heard it.
Hannah: It’s just stuff that is cozy and nice. It's not necessarily simplifying or making your life better by getting rid of things, but by having things that give you a cozy feeling. Things that make you feel good. Hot drinks, cuddling up in a blanket, reading a book, burning a candle. Having nature in your house, like having plants, getting roses. Most people who talk about it on YouTube and stuff are the folks who have little bamboos in the background and it's all white everywhere.
Clare: Nothing says “simplicity” like a pile of neatly stacked flat rocks.
Hannah: Or an empty room with bamboo mat flooring.
Clare: With like, a stick leaning in the corner or something.
Hannah: Another aspect of hygge is having handmade things: handmade pottery to drink out of, having artwork that you or your children or your husband, wife, made.
I think maybe it's because we...It started with us drinking tea every day when we would get home. But I found that a lot of these things, I already do.
Clare: I would say that as a person, you sort of embody hygge. Because when you came in, you had all your layers. You had a lovely sweater and you had a scarf on and your coat and your gloves and you just looked cozy. Just walking in.
Hannah: I like to be cozy.
Clare: What are some other autumn things? Pumpkin. Apple cider.
Hannah: Walking with your umbrella in a light drizzle. Remember when we were kids and we used to go and play out in the rain? We used to put on our rain suits, our rain jackets and our rain pants and our rain boots and go run around the backyard and jump in puddles.
Clare: I remember that.
Hannah: Go for a little romp in the rain.
Clare: That was when we lived in California. We had to turn the sprinklers on it to do that.
Hannah: No, I remember doing that in California when it was actually raining.
Clare: It was actually raining?
Hannah: Whenever it would rain, we'd all get excited and say, "Let's go outside and play in the rain!"
Clare: I remember putting the sprinklers on though, because you guys wanted to go run around in your rain suits and rain boots, which I thought was really cute. All three of you, out there in your rain things.
Another word that comes to mind, with autumn--and this is why it's so beautiful that autumn comes around every year and we're blessed in this climate to have a very good autumn every year. I think that autumn is the best time of year where we live, and it's the word...ready For this? Our vocabulary word for the day other than hygge. What else did we say?
Hannah: Sehnsucht.
Clare: We said some big words today. There'll be a quiz after this.
Hannah: Will you quiz me or will I quiz you?
Clare: We will quiz the audience.
Hannah: But they're not here yet. This is just you and me sitting here, alone, together.
Clare: Senescence!
Hannah: Just ignore me! (laughing)
Clare: The word is senescence. Let's flash it on the screen and we can spell it. S-E-N-E-S…
Hannah: Can you use the word end sentence?
Clare: Yes. Autumn is an exemplification of natural senescence. As a person who recently turned to 53, I have direct personal experience of senescence. Yes, senescence is the process of aging. It's also the state of being old.
Hannah: I take care of the old, so I witness this as well.
Clare: Yes. I do not consider myself old but I'm certainly at--at least--the beginning stages of senescence, and autumn is all about senescence. The reason the leaves fall from trees is because they're going through a process of aging and falling off, and the concept of death and decay comes in as well.
Falling leaves. We're going to talk about the Lord of the Rings in two episodes in a row.
Hannah: It wouldn't be a discussion between you and me without mentioning the Lord of the rings.
Clare: I know. We can't help it. In the first one, Fellowship of the Ring, the way they film this, they very deliberately put the idea of autumn senescence in it because that's the culture of the elves: leaving Middle-earth. Their culture is declining. Their culture is in a state of senescence. So the scenes that take place in Rivendell, and I guess in Lothlorien as well, involve falling leaves. It's clearly autumn, and there are many scenes that take place in Riverdell. You could see leaves on the on the ground, red colored leaves on the trees, and then leaves falling.
Hannah: There's a wide shot of all the trees in the Valley and everything.
Clare: Everything is turning color. So that idea of senescence. A thing that epitomizes autumn is the idea of senescence. The idea, also, of impermanence. That things are ephemeral. The summer bounty, this lushness that we just recently enjoyed: it goes away. Just the way the vigor of youth eventually goes away and instead of fighting against that, instead of railing against that and lamenting that fact, I mean, let's celebrate it.
Which leads me into the next word.
Hannah: We have another word?
Clare: Yes! This is a very word-centric podcast. And not just words, but words in other languages other than English. Listen to this: wabi-sabi.
Hannah: I’m thinking wasabi. My mouth hurt a little bit when you said…
Clare: …Wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi is a Japanese word. And look at me--I'm being technological. I'm going to go to my iPad here and get the word wabi-sabi. I'm quoting from a website here in traditional Japanese aesthetics: “Wabi-sabi is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”
Is there anything more emblematic of that concept than autumn leaves?
Hannah: They're very pretty, but they go away.
Clare: They go away and they're a sign that we're going to experience a little mini-death of things. The trees will look dead during the winter. We know they're not, but…
Hannah: "The little death." What is that? Oh, that's from Dune. "Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration."
Clare: Whoa! Nice! Nicely quoted there.
Hannah: Thank you.
Clare: I like that. That was good. Dune is a great book.
Hannah: There's a great audio book and it's a dramatization and I really enjoy it. I should find it for you. It's good.
Clare: I need to read that book again. They're going to make a movie out of it.
Hannah: I heard that. I hope it's better than the one that I saw from the 70s. That was terrible. I watched it with my buddy Andrew, cause we both really liked Dune.
Clare: It might have been from the 80s because I saw it when I was a teenager.
Hannah: It was horrible.
Clare: It wasn’t very good. Even without the good technology to really do justice to the sand worms and the spaceships and things, they could have done it right if they'd done a better job with the story.
Hannah: And for some reason the fat Baron was flying around like Augustus Gloop or something.
Clare: Did he fly through the air?
Hannah: He did, he blasted off and was flying above people, cackling maniacally.
Clare: Augustus Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
Hannah: Oh, he went up the chocolate pipe.
Clare: Yeah. So who was floating above everybody?
Hannah: The Baron.
Clare: No, no. From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Who was floating above everyone? It wasn't Augustus Gloop?
Hannah: No, no. I think just because I was thinking of a rotund character above and that's who I thought of. Because he went up the chocolate pipe. Don't look too deeply into my comparison.
Clare: (laughing). All right. Wabi-sabi is a celebration of imperfection and, and there are some related concepts. What if you crack a pot? Do you repair it right away, or do you let it sit there in its cracked, imperfect, yet still beautiful state? You can leave it there or you could do a little thing to it. Something called kinsuki. That is a Japanese art form.
Hannah: Do you know, actually, I also took Japanese in school.
Clare: You did.
Hannah: In high school. I took Japanese.
Clare: So you know how to pronounce this. Kinsuki. It is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. Kinsukimeans “golden joinery.” So--as a philosophy--listen to this: It treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object rather than something to disguise.
Hannah: Cool. That's awesome.
Clare: “Breakage and repair, as part of the history of an object rather than something to disguise.” You could say something about people with that, couldn't you?
Hannah: There's a friend of mine who was one of the girls that I worked with in Scotland for a year. We were traveling around to different schools, inspiring kids in Scotland and sort of helping them be more spiritually aware and stuff like that.
Clare: Youth conferences...
Hannah: This teammate of mine, when she was one year old, she was crawling all around and she pulled a deep fat fryer that was going off of the counter. And the oil got all over her: her arm, her side, her leg. Not too much of it was visible, usually. If she wore shorts, you could see her leg had some and her side had some, and then there was always this part of her arm right here that you could see was all burned and stuff.
Clare: Did she have facial burns also?
Hannah: No, she didn't
Clare: She was very fortunate that it didn't.
Hannah: Yeah. She would always tell that story at conferences, especially ones that we did for girls’ schools, and it was this thing about body image and how you're still a beautiful person, even when you're disfigured and all that. That was always a really awesome story. We'd always have her do that because it's just…wow. 33% of her body was burned. With oil.
Clare: So she's got pretty severe scars.
Hannah: And she's one of the happiest people I know, like almost annoying how happy she was.
Clare: That’s something to not be shy about and not think that you have to cover it up. It is part of the history--part of her history--rather than something to disguise.
Hannah: Exactly.
Clare: That's awesome.
Hannah: I hadn't thought about that in ages.
Clare: Well, it came up. It's like association.
Hannah: I should let her know.
Clare: Definitely.
Hannah: “Your story is spreading far and wide.”
Clare: The other concept when talking about senescence is another Japanese term: mono no aware.
Hannah: Isn't that a card from L5R?
Clare: It is. L5R--Legends of the Five Rings--which is another competitive card game that we play. Mono no aware means literally “the pathos of things.” There's a couple of other ways of translating that phrase: “an empathy toward things.” And this is, I think, one of the best ones: “a sensitivity to ephemera.” It means being aware of the impermanence or transience of things.
When you're playing a competitive card game, what you're trying to do is build your board so that you can get to your mid-game and your end-game before your opponent does, so that you can have more threats on the board than your opponent can answer.
The modern, the current version of [L5R] is a little bit different. You do build a board, but what you do is you put these little things called fate tokens on the things that you put on the board. And every round, anything that has a fate token on it loses a fate token. Anything that does not have a fate token on it goes away. The board state in Legend of the Five Rings is very impermanent. One of the ways that you do better in that game is by breaking that concept, by doing things that keep your things on the board longer so you can use them more.
But there is a card in the L5R called Mono No Aware. What it does is it takes all the fate off every character on the board so that they will go away at the next.
Hannah: So then there's a blank slate at next one.
Clare: Yeah. So it's very much a celebration of, it makes everything impermanent.
Hannah: I didn't understand that card before.
Clare: Anyway, that's why I really love autumn and I wanted to talk about autumn because it is autumn now. We've just gotten our jackets out. We've been enjoying the cold weather now. For some reason we're enjoying snow, but that that's again, I mean, you talk about impermanence. Here's the joke about the weather in this area: "Oh, you don't like the weather around here? Stick around. In half an hour, it will be different."
Hannah: That actually has happened. I didn't think of that.
Clare: Oh yeah, it's true.
Hannah: People think that we're fools for carrying umbrellas all the time. No, no, no.
Clare: Do you feel like we have covered this topic adequately?
Hannah: I think we have. I feel content.
Clare: So shall we sign off? Shall we make this conversation ephemeral?
Hannah: Let's do that.
Clare: All right, Hannah. Let me just conclude by saying, “As you wish.”
Hannah: Aw.
Clare: All right. See you later everybody!
Hannah: ‘Bye!