The August Letter

Dear Sophie, 

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   A Fall leaf landed on my head today. Do you ever find it interesting that for—give or take—the first two decades of your life, Fall marks the beginning of something new? Memories of school children lined up with their brand new backpacks, some with the tags still on; all pigtails and giggles behind buck-teeth. But now—for me and you—I feel a beginning to an end. There is a loss here. Every night that dips below 10 degrees and every strand of yellowing grass; they are Summer’s timid goodbyes. And Summer’s end precursors only the finality of another year's passing. Sousa marches end with a stinger, but there are songs that simply fade out—well, I’ve always thought they were cowardly for it. And now these years feel the same. 

   Here’s what I think, Sophie, as I feel Summer slip away: 

   In accordance with cliche, one always gets a sense that Summer is the most romantic of the seasons. People fall in love all the time, but the Summer flings are special. They are the ones most written about. The Summer promises some kind of escape. In that alternative world, inhibitions lower and yearning becomes the primary emotion. In the matter of a few weeks, a stranger becomes a friend, a lover, rapidly. Ripening like a peach. Then and also, Sun and heat and humidity flush cheeks. Summer is our lover. Blushing, we wear on our faces Summer’s love for us. 

   Fall is different. I am biased, yes, but I’ve always thought that Fall is a little kitschy in the same way skinny jeans are kitschy. They both only work if your name is Manon and you wear red lipstick with dainty gold jewelry and kitten heels. But for everyone else, and perhaps for the Manons of the world also, any romance in Fall is wrapped in a bundle of artificiality. Nothing like the rawness of Summer. And how can we possibly love when Summer’s love has left us? The tans fade and the sunburns heal. People, arrogantly—and incorrectly—believe they can simply leave behind the passion and beauty of Summer. They torture themselves into returning to the routine, the prim and proper. Fall is about pretending. It’s about falling out of love, and being lonely in the Winter.

   And what produce is there, in the Fall? In the marketplace today, Fall has given us baskets of yellow squash formed into solid walls, and apples the color of tree leaves that litter tables. Fall is the time of cinnamon and nutmeg, which I have never cared for. It is too cold for Summer’s peach and cucumber, and it is not cold enough for the heartiness of a Winter stew. 

   Spring is a time of rebirth and Winter, death. And we will have had the proper time to be ready for it. By Winter we will be expecting the snow—the ice that freezes rivers, the wind that desolates the trees. But Fall, meek and unassuming, always catches us off guard. 

   Here is a phenomenon people don’t often recognize: endings in themselves have duration. The beginning is always one of panic. We mourn what is still there simply because we feel that the edges have started fraying. Later, in the duration between the beginning-of-the-end and the end-of-the-end, we are lulled into a kind of numbness and at times, acceptance. But it is a false acceptance, and it does not prepare us at all for the true end-of-the-end—abrupt, because it is so drastic, painful, and startlingly real. As such, this Summer fades out cruelly; the end is long but only in the way a needle injection is a dull, steady pain as it slowly pushes in, sharpening the instant it’s pulled out of the arm. 

   This morning I woke up at eight but stayed in bed for another hour after. I have already forgotten the night’s dream. Sophie, the land of dreams has always seemed to me like a movie theatre. All those blurred images play out in the space below the eyelids. Then, the process of waking up is not unlike how a train might exit a mountain tunnel and fill every window with light; a chill passes through the body and every nerve comes alive. Sometimes just the slightest rustle is enough—a reminder that there are presences outside the dream world. The presences exist in the back of your subconscious when asleep, and it is only after you wake that you recognize them, for in that span of time—the time it takes for the train to exit—they travel from the background of the theatre to the foreground, off the stage and into the audience area, the conscious. I loitered in the after-effects of the chill, the lit train, until my head started to hurt.

   I’m not sure why it happens, Sophie, but it happens to me often. Sloth is a sin, and the world punishes me for over-resting in the form of a headache.

   The air in the apartment is extraordinarily dry because I always turn up the thermostat at night. Often, I wake up with a sore throat, the kind where it hurts to swallow water—a cure that makes the problem worse, briefly. This Fall gifts me headaches and sore throats. 

   Outside, the streets are filled with those leaves that once excited you. They crunched under your ratty sneakers. But now it seems they are only soggy and sticky, sticky to the bottom of my shoes and tracking all over my floors. It was on these miserable streets that I walked to the museum. 

   A peculiar thing happened as I was entering the museum, Sophie. It was the landing of the leaf on my head. 

   The museum, the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, is excessively ostentatious. Its decor serves the purpose of engendering within every passing visitor the prestigious feeling of being royalty, of absolute wealth. The paintings are a part of this decor. To visit the Gallery is to imagine that you have become the owner of a grand palace and countless masterpieces. 

   Titian painted Judith once and Salome twice, and there is a fourth mysterious painting—where it is unclear whether or not the main figure is either Judith or Salome—which hangs in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery. The Bible is the source of so much agony throughout world history, but you must admire that it contains not one but two stories containing a woman holding the severed head of a bearded man. 

Titian was an artist of the flesh, of texture. He painted skin that could be felt, fur that could be petted, as if to proclaim that the essence of things is contained in the flesh, the outer-appearances; what can be seen, what can be felt, is what is. He demands, then, to behold the world of his construction, his paint rendering and bringing into being satyrs and kings, the Madonna and the infant Christ. With every painting he derived the sensation of being the creator of the world.

   This ambiguous Salome/Judith painting preceded the peak of his textural philosophy; the style is not discernibly unique compared to other painters of the time. Even still, the gaze of this figure is captivating. She turns away from John’s head but her eyes remain. One questions whether she first faced the head before turning away all except the eyes, or whether, from the moment of receiving the platter onward, she was always turned away, and only in this exact moment did she flicker her eyes towards him, with a flutter of eyelashes that is not in the slightest coquettish, but rather elegant and honest. Her lips curve neither upwards into a smile nor downwards into a frown. In total, she gives the outer appearance of seductive ambivalence. She is both familiar and unfamiliar. The mystery, of all that she is, invites. 

   I continued walking. The contemporary act of visiting a museum, Sophie, is an exercise in pride and pretension. In museums we are surrounded by prestige and the classical ideals of beauty, and enveloped in what is considered an epicenter of culture. Paintings hang on the walls with nothing more than a little square of text to the side for explanation. Very few leave museums with a sense of being educated in the same way they might leave a library. Yet what differentiates the two? 

   The modern understanding of a museum is as a collection of sights, not stories. Running parallel to this is an understanding that to be cultured is to find meaning in these sights, despite the deliberate removal of their storyhood. Removed by whom? History’s victors; erasers of other histories. Their use of classical works—though to be clear the sin is not in the use but in the purpose—is in bolstering the beauty of tradition. The bountiful harvests of still-lifes and the rolling hills of landscapes represent property—what money can buy. And look how beautiful such a past was. Observe every brushstroke, proof of the artist’s mastery of realism, their pure skill. But nothing more. In the museum the paintings hang, more inert than mountain rock. Sophie, perhaps we might ask: Can the image of the crudely opulent then may have similarities to the obscenely rich now? Can the painter living then—with all of their worldview, day-to-day life, emotion and love embedded onto a canvas—have similarities to us now? Perhaps we wonder what the painting does, how it functions, what effect it has on us when looking deeply, looking with lucid attention. Only, our tour guides cannot explain these effects—because nothing can fully explain a work of art besides itself (though there are times where even that is not enough)—and instead explain how eggs were mixed in paint or how wood and canvas differ. It is our fault that we never wonder much further than that.

   The art is not explained to us, and our own culture and way of thinking obfuscates it, but it must have some kind of “meaning” for it to be hanging here in the museum. The standard museum visitor finds themself ignorant of the mystical meanings within these sights and has two choices: they may, if particularly confident, decide that fine art is a waste of time, or they will submit to the dominant culture and pretend they have mastered the discovery of these meanings. To publicize the image of yourself in front of a painting is the result of the latter choice. The photo begs: Look at me. Look at the me that is cultured, the me that can find some kind of artificial meaning in what has already been rendered meaningless. There is that falsity, the falsity that reminds me of Fall. 

   Sophie, the truth is that the painting reminded me of you. I know you may find this very nonsensical, and it’s true that Titian’s Salome/Judith figure looks nothing at all like you, except perhaps the height of your nose. You know I have always loved your nose. But really it was her essence which reminded me of you. And you, do you still paint, as you did when we were younger? Your coiling hair carried the smell of that cheap citrus shampoo and turpentine. 

   The second truth, Sophie, is that I am getting married in the Spring. Here I smile to myself because I have never written those words before, and having written them down, I get the feeling that I have written some great exaggeration. The enormity of their promise is unlike anything I have ever written; this promise is hardly believable to even myself. 

   He is a pianist, my fiance. In fact he reminds me faintly of a boy from our youth, the one with the strong eyebrows, if you remember him. Your friend—who was perhaps my friend as well, though I suspected neither of us liked her very much—liked him, the boy with the strong eyebrows. As did I. It has been a very long time since then, hasn’t it? Now, even you and I have lost touch. I write this letter for an address-less envelope. 

   Perhaps I am rambling now, but it all goes to show that people’s tastes do not change very much, and isn’t that funny? 

   Sophie, I feel that that was a lie. The times do change us irreparably, as does the traveling; the times and the places mold us into new beings. I must confess that occasionally when I find myself with truly nothing to do, I imagine what your face looks like now, your face which, even then, looked very young for our age. Almond eyes, soft cheeks and freckles; your eyelashes long; a true ingénue. I wonder how different you are now. I wonder if I can recognize your toothy smile. 

   Sophie, I believe he is a good man. I believe I love him. And now, the prospect of marriage rushes towards me like that lit train from before, but I am outside it, not a passenger. I am at the station, waiting to travel to where I have never been before. 

   When I look out the window, it is orange-red and earthy yellow. And it is falling. There is wind and the leaves are falling. The museum-goers walk in the streets with upturned noses. Do they know about the artificiality of this time of year? This ending? Perhaps they know just as well as I do. But when I think of the Salome painting, when I think of you, my past, and everything approaching in the future, I am reminded that endings—no matter how long—are temporary. 

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Your old friend, 

Nora