October 6, 2022

Re: Kierkegaard, Ecclesiastes, and the Changing of the Seasons

When my kids were younger, summer was a glorious time. For about a five year period, we’d go each summer to Cape Cod (typically to Wellfleet) for a week, sometimes a bit longer. On the drive up, we’d always stop at Frank Pepe’s—a Neapolitan-style pizzeria in New Haven, Connecticut. I’d usually insist on a White Clam Pizza, washing it down with a Peroni. But it didn’t really matter: everything on the menu was good. We’d get back on the road, snaking through the constant on-again/off-again traffic that’s almost peculiar to Connecticut, until we’d head east and finally cross the Bourne Bridge onto the Cape. After settling in, we adhered to a daily schedule: coffee on the beach in the morning (the kids building sand castles or splashing in the still morning tide), early lunch at a clam shack or dive bar, afternoon nap, back to the ocean around 3.30pm, and, finally, Cape Cod League baseball (either Chatham or Orleans) at night. Everyday was blissfully the same. Even now, when I envision a break from quotidian life, this is where my mind goes. I’ve been fortunate enough to live overseas, and I’ve traveled to 46 American states (with apologies to Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington), but the “eternal now” of these lazy summer days is what I long for.

Alas, apart from a few hours here and there, it’s been years since I’ve been to the beach. My kids have gotten older; life has gotten busy. When they were young, time seemed to creep; today, it seems to fly. I was talking with a friend of mine recently, and we decided that, in an ontological sense, this is what a midlife crisis is. It’s not buying a cherry-red convertible or getting an earring (or what have you). Those would be symptoms, but they are not the crisis itself. The crisis is the sense that time is accelerating—like a roller-coaster as it begins its plunge—and that nothing can be done to stop it. Modern life intensifies this feeling. Between emails and Zoom calls and Twitter feeds and interstate traffic, an entire day can pass with nary a thought to life’s ceaseless becoming. It’s hard to observe the flux when you’re caught up in it. But then it hits you, usually at random times—at a funeral, while waiting to board a flight, when an offhand comment reveals the temporal chasm separating you from your children.

Of course, it’s not surprising that I associate life’s happiest moments with summertime. Traditionally, summer has been identified with abundance and wholeness, while other seasons call to mind different circumstances or feelings: winter is bleak, tranquil, a time of rest; spring is congenial, vibrant, a period of growth. But what about autumn? Somehow it seems harder to place. I know many people who view fall as the best season. They look forward to its cooler temperatures, the trees’ blazing colors, and the weekends of bonfires and football. And yet, I know just as many who see autumn as a melancholy portent of the arrival of winter’s dark and cold. This understanding of autumn is implicit in the liturgical calendar of Western Christianity, which has set aside three fall days to remember the dead—a triduum known as Allhallowtide, beginning with All Saints’ Eve (Halloween) on October 31. Interestingly, what unites these diverse perspectives is the theme of change. Whether or not one loves or dreads autumn, there is no doubting its status as a dynamic, even volatile time of year.

Kierkegaard, for one, would agree with this assessment. In 1846, he experimented with a set of pseudonymous discourses collectively entitled Eulogy on Autumn (Lovtale over Efteraaret). This work was meant to be organized according to different facets of the fall season, as outlined in this journal entry:

Autumn is: the time of longings, the time of colors, the time of clouds, the time of sounds (sound is transmitted far more animatedly and swiftly than in the oppressive summer heat), the time of recollections.

Here the words “more animatedly” (livligere) and “more swiftly” (hurtigere) indicate Kierkegaard’s fundamental contention—that autumn approximates the constant movement of human existence. Just as the fall’s clouds “hurry like vagabond dreams,” pulling apart and meeting again, so do our thoughts weave in and out in brooding contemplation: “And truly there is no better symbol for clouds than thoughts and no better symbol for thought than clouds—clouds are brain-weaving, and what else are thoughts. That is why we become weary of everything else but not of the clouds—in the autumn, which again is the time for reflecting.”

It is the same with color. The skies of summer are clear and beautiful, and, in this way, approximate the perfection of eternity: “Everything characterized by immobility, repose, would therefore not have color. A mathematician would not color a triangle; summer is repose, serenity, is therefore colorless—the unremittingly blue heaven is certainly not color.” But color, by way of contrast, is an epiphany of change and, indeed, of “disturbance.” Autumn’s interplay of greens, oranges, reds, and yellows bespeaks the season’s inherent tension between life and death. For the vibrance of summer is vying with the gloom of winter, and this contrast manifests as autumnal color:

How curious it is that in the summer time no one really sees that a green leaf is really green, no one sees the poetry in the green of the summer, in all the green--it is almost as if one eats green. But in the autumn! When the birch tree stands bare, with only one single green but freshly green leaf on its naked branch, then you see the color green, you see it by contrast.

Ultimately, for Kierkegaard, there is a kind of despair to autumn—a sense of dismal inevitability. The task is to face it with courage. As he continues:

The ‘dusky-hued autumn’ is therefore not merely melancholy—it is heroic—for it is nature's doom, its battle for life. It bows under the annihilation—this is the sadness—but then again it is as if the delight of summer is momentarily remembered and echoed, but far more intensely, for the time is short.

The allusion to memory here is significant. Throughout his authorship, Kierkegaard insists that “recollection” (Erindring) is a critical part of self-development. To recollect is to integrate past experiences into a meaningful whole. At its best, recollection serves to provide continuity amid the flux of time. For example, if a parent lacked the capacity for recollection, she would not be able to see her child in a larger perspective. The hardships of the teenage years are far more bearable when understood against the backdrop of an entire life. Moreover, in Works of Love (1847), Kierkegaard maintains that recollection is essential to the practice of love (Kjerlighed), since it stands as bulwark against the ravages of time and space. Indeed, how else is one to love a person who is not physically or temporally present? Whether we are talking about a deceased relative or even about God himself, love is often sustained by recollection. Erindring is the self’s innate defense against decay.

The fact that Kierkegaard intended to conclude Eulogy on Autumn with a discourse on recollection is thus significant. Among other things, it implies that the fall season, precisely by foregrounding change and movement, encourages us to recollect, to ponder how our own lives have changed and moved and, in turn, to seek what Kierkegaard elsewhere calls “the eternal continuity in life.” Despite never publishing his autumnal discourses, these are themes to which Kierkegaard would return and on which he would base much of his thinking. After all, the dialectic between the unchangeable and the changeable underpins the Dane’s much-celebrated emphasis on the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and creation, not to mention his conception of the human self.

Still, however rhetorically deft and psychologically perceptive, Kierkegaard’s writings on this topic are not altogether innovative. To be sure, there are strong hints of St. Augustine and Meister Eckhart, but arguably one of Kierkegaard’s most fundamental sources is the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. Rabbinic tradition has long held that Ecclesiastes (קֹהֶלֶת) was written by King Solomon, but the text identifies the author simply as the “Preacher” (Kohelet). This is a fitting title, as Kohelet, who indeed claims to have been “king over Israel in Jerusalem” (Eccles. 1:12),¹ speaks from a position of authority—not only in relation to political power, but also in relation to his variegated life experiences and his related ability to distill perennial wisdom from earthly chaos. After an opening in which Kohelet proclaims that “all is vanity,” he argues that the vicissitudes of life, however predictable, leave a person disappointed and weary:

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. (Eccles. 1:3-11).

As if anticipating Kierkegaard’s famous “spheres of existence,” Kohelet goes on to explain that spiritual exhaustion will find a person no matter her approach to or station in life. The pursuit of pleasure, he begins, is vanity: “I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards” (Eccles. 2:4), but neither these nor “servants and maidens” (Eccles. 2:7) can satisfy. The same is true of politics and matters of state: “the oppressed” have no comfort, but neither do “their oppressors” (Eccles. 4:1). But perhaps it is enough to live a good life, to be a “good person” and to focus on acts of charity and kindness. Alas, says Kohelet, even this strategy is dubious: “There is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness” (Eccles. 7:15). Human beings don’t want to acknowledge this reality. Just as they soak up the long days of summer, so do they long for intelligibility and stability. And yet, just as the leaves wither and fade every autumn, so must people admit that change and decay is the lot of all earthly creatures. As Kohelet states:

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. (Eccles. 3:19-20)

Commentators have long pondered whether or not Ecclesiastes is a nihilistic book. Perhaps, some have suggested, the book’s ostensibly sanguine conclusion (Eccles. 12:9-14) was a later interpolation, added to paper over Kohelet’s fundamental Weltschmerz. But this interpretation seems to miss the point. Neither the Preacher nor his subsequent redactors are trying to develop a particular philosophical school. On the contrary, Kohelet is describing the world’s ceaseless becoming (“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” [Eccles. 3:1]) and identifying “wisdom” (חָכְמָ֔ה) as the unflinching acceptance of this reality. Such, indeed, is Kierkegaard’s overarching purpose in “Eulogy on Autumn,” not to mention other writings. Moreover, in a passage that Kierkegaard himself would exegete,² Kohelet ends by encouraging the listener to summon the powers of recollection in order to weather the days when "the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail" (Eccles. 12:5). As he puts it, indirectly recalling the passage from summer's bliss to autumn's decline, "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them" (Eccles. 12:1).

1. All biblical citations are from the KJV.

2. See the first section of Kierkegaard’s 1844 work Three upbuilding Discourses (Tre opbyggelige Taler).