lanterns and leaves

on the times, they are a-changin'

Woman At The Window by Andrew Wyeth

In her novel The Years, Virginia Woolf marks the passage of time by opening each chapter with a description of the season it takes place in. The reader proceeds to spend a day in Spring, then Autumn, then Summer, then Spring again…and so on and so forth.

These passages are my favourite feature of the novel, not only because they demonstrate the deft way Woolf sets the backdrop of her stories (never before have I wanted to visit early 20th century London more), but because of the function she has for them: as illustrations for the changing moods and personalities of the novel’s cast.

The season is changing. Summer is loitering by the door, one warm hand still on the knob, one foot dangling off the front step. Autumn is somewhere around the corner. I wait eagerly for it—the months with the -ber suffix always endeavour to be good to me, and I’m a little superstitious, so our arrangement works out well. But Woolf promised new people with the changing season, and so, as I’m craning my neck for a sight of Autumn, I’m also secretly searching for something—someone—else.

“…and I’m out with lanterns, searching for myself,” wrote Emily Dickinson in a letter to a friend. I’ve found myself returning to this passage quite often over the last few weeks. Dickinson had just moved, and some of her things (or “effects”, as she calls them) had been lost in transit, including a hat and her best shoes. Their loss entailed to her a wayward self; I, meanwhile, am not moving anywhere at the moment, but I fear my own “effects”—the things, the traits, and the people I associate myself with—have been lost in the hustle and bustle that is an ordinary life.

Friends are moving. Ticking boxes on university applications brings on a new kind of exhausted confusion. And at an art therapy session that I attended recently with some schoolmates, when we were supposed to be using guided meditation in order to “reinvent ourselves”, I wasn’t sure what my hand was trying to grasp in the distance.

I think I might be afraid of what fate is trying to decide for me. How can it, when whatever’s in front of it is mutable, fickle, and a tad bit inconsiderate in its inconsistency (that’s the beauty of being young and impressionable, I suppose)? When change strides into your life, what does it mean for the person you’re trying to be?

A glimmer of a lantern or a changing of the seasons are good things to hold onto when clarity is a little hazy. The lines I keep returning to are an assurance of that, but they also feel like a challenge—so, the times they are a-changin’?¹ I’m in, as long as I get to watch the colour of the leaves turn.

It’s October. I’m searching for myself. I’m going to take Virginia’s words in stride in this search, “And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”² I’m going to let it be.

1. A completely coincidental Bob Dylan reference

2. From ‘To The Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf