Melancholy days: thoughts in season - autumn - Editorial

Christian Century, Oct 19, 1994 by James M. Wall

The seasonal shift from the warm breezes of summer to the chilling winds of autumn drew this negative review from poet William Cullen Bryant: "The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,/of wailing winds and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear." True enough, but not completely so. Soon winter will compensate with its own beauty, and within a few months spring will return to remind us that death is not the end. To know this is to participate in one of those sets of experiences that make us human.

Archaeologist Ronald Fletcher acknowledges that much of what sets humans apart from other animals - our sexual behavior, power of speech, moral beliefs, care for the aged - is not entirely absent outside the human race. Other species possess these attributes in less-refined ways. Humans speak to one another in words, but other animals do communicate; sexual activity for purposes other than procreation is not unique to the human; moral codes, highly developed in humans, are evident among lower forms; and care for the aged is practiced by other species. But after looking back over 5 million years, Fletcher concludes that there are three capacities that set humans apart from all other living creatures. Two of these, as he reports in The First Humans: An Illustrated History of Humankind (HarperCollins, 1993), are familiar: the capacity to control fire and to represent the universe in art. Our earliest ancestors used fire for warmth, protection and ultimately as a tool. They also translated their personal and communal experiences into visual representations, as we have discovered from cave art and artifacts.

Fletcher's third unique mark of humanness, however, is less obvious, and even more provocative: humankind, he says, is unique in its ability and desire to interact socially with the dead. This trait is what makes autumn so emotion-laden: the season reminds us that to be human is to refuse to accept death as a terminus. There is something about death that touches a chord in the human soul, evoking the insistence that whatever happens to us in this life, there must be more. The winter barrenness will pass, flowers will again appear on the earth, and "the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land."

The land of the dead, as some cultures envision the "other side," is known to us only through metaphorical descriptions heard and taken on faith. For Christians, there is one who has returned from that land. Knowledge of this return is ours not because we have touched or seen the wounds of the crucified Christ, but because the experience of faith assures us that it is so. That faith answers our need to know that death is not the end.

I was reflecting on the temporary melancholy brought on by the arrival of "wailing winds and naked woods" when I encountered Fletcher's words about the human effort to connect with that land from "whom no visitor has returned." I decided to be on the lookout for reassuring messages. To my delight, I soon came across one of those little stories that serves as a reminder that our human condition unites us in "the capacity to interact socially with the dead."

New York-based writer John Berendt was conducting research for a book on the city of Savannah, Georgia. He recounts in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Random House, 1994) how he met Mary Harty, who took him on a tour of the city that led to a small family cemetery where songwriter Johnny Mercer, among others, is buried. Walking further along a "crest of a low bluff overlooking a broad, slow-moving expanse of water," Berendt and Harty arrived at a shady area where they found a gravestone and a granite bench.

Harty had brought along liquid refreshment. After pouring drinks into the silver goblets she had brought in a picnic basket, she pointed to the stone which indicated that this was the burial site of Dr. William F. Aiken and his wife, Anna, the parents of poet Conrad Aiken, both of whom died on the same day, February 27, 1901. On that day Conrad, then nine, heard his parents quarreling in their home on Oglethorpe Avenue. After he heard two shots, he ran across the street to the police station and announced, "Papa has just shot Mama and then shot himself."

Conrad Aiken was raised by relatives, went to Harvard, and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. When he retired, Conrad Aiken returned to Savannah and, according to Mary Harty, "kept pretty much to himself." From time to time, until his own death, he and his wife would go out to the grave site, "watch the ships go by ... talk to his departed parents and pour libations to them."

Since there were no other gravestones in the enclosure, Berendt asked, Where is Aiken buried? "Oh, he's here," said Harty. "In fact, we are very much his personal guests at the moment. It was Aiken's wish that people should come to this beautiful place after he died." He wanted people to come to this spot and "watch the ships just as he did. He left a gracious invitation to that effect. He had his gravestone built in the shape of a bench." Berendt then comments: "An involuntary reflex propelled me to my feet. Miss Harty laughed, and then she too stood up. Aiken's name was inscribed on the bench."