October is the time to revisit Thoreau’s October 1862 essay “Autumnal Tints,” even for readers not living in Thoreau’s New England. The essay is representative of Thoreau’s skill in merging observation of nature with a philosophical aesthetics, yielding insights into both nature and thought. Thoreau describes the variety and beauty of the autumnal foliage of his Massachusetts region both as a lay scientist and a phiosophical popularizer.
A central analogy in the essay is of autumnal leaves with fruit. Both are fruit, Thoreau notes, both responding to the peak of their ripeness, signaling separation from the tree that bears them:
“Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it commences a more independent and individual existence, requiring less nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth through its stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. So do leaves.”
Further, the colors of ripeness in fruit attract our eye and confirm the readiness to take the fruit to ourselves. So, too, the colors of the changing foliage at autumn signal by their magnificent colors the leaves’ ripeness, their maturation and age, their readiness to fall, expiring to attain this natural circle.
“How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.”
Thoreau contrasts such a treę (maple, elm, chestnut, birch, which he mentions specifically) with its green arboreal neighbors about it green deciduous trees, which do not lose their leaves). But as the multitudinous hardwood leaves fall, nothing is wasted. Nature carefully husbands this abundance.
“Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf’s thickness to the depth of the soil. This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I chaffer with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the cost of carting. We are all the richer for their decay. I am more interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens. It keeps our home stead in good heart.”
But Thoreau wants to present this autumnal phenomenan as not only natural but necessary, for do we. too, not age and quit the threaded source of our vitality. We must admire nature’s methodology, leaving us a brilliant show of aesthetic value, and to boot a lesson of natural philosophy and science, a tutorial in agriculture, sustainability, and wise instruction for a metaphysics. Simply by pointing to what is before us.
“How many flutterings before the leaves rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe, with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.”
“When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs. … Let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves,—this is your true Greenwood Cemetery.”
Thus the aesthetics of autumnal tints harbor a deeper lesson and a melancholy which may check the aesthetics of the colors, pointing us to the reality of finality. But nature is never final. We must observe and reflect on every season to capture the whole lesson. The molding leaves will feed the soil around the forest, and spring will return to build the leafy armor of the trees again, fortify them in summer, usher them through livelihood until the return of autumn and the completion of another cyclical journey, pointing to still another. There is melancholy, but perhaps of the Eatern expression, evoking poignance in the scene before us. At such moments, we ought not tofail to observe the heartfelt lessons Thoreau suggests.