“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
~Paul Bowles, passage taken from ‘The Sheltering Sky’
When I took this photo back in late October, I distinctly remember that autumn had departed suddenly. Almost in an instant, gone were the red leaves and gossamer. The magnificent golden strands of light which occur only for a few weeks prior to the winter solstice were now but a faded memory. And winter, that wretched season of a single color, was being ushered in by a sly north wind moving purposefully through the switchgrass.
Standing in the light of the last full moon of autumn, I guess I honestly expected to feel a sense of sadness; saying goodbye to autumn has never been easy. But what I didn’t expect to experience on this night was the profound sense of the brevity of this existence. With the realization that more autumns are behind than lie ahead, there stirs in my heart a quiet–and very real–pain.
How could I have squandered so many sunsets? How many times have I neglected the turning of the leaves? How many times have I lounged beneath the covers as the sunrise set ablaze the morning sky?
And how many more opportunities will I have to watch the full moon rise?
A full moon rises over abandoned train tracks, central NE
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