THE READER
All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.
It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.
No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, “Everything
Falls back to coldness,
Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden.”
The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.
-Wallace Stevens
It’s a benevolent autumn day. Rain is coming, possibly in a few minutes, and next week the nighttime temperatures will fall sharply again. But at this blessed moment… I discovered that it’s warmer outside than in. I went out to look for figs that the squirrels hadn’t eaten, and filled my apron more than once with pineapple guavas (Feijoa sellowiana) instead.
Clouds come and go. Soft and warm gusts of wind blow one thing and another out of its place. Last week I laid a fire, and I keep putting off lighting it. I’ve been too busy to tend or enjoy a fire in the stove, and the weather has been mild enough to do without. But on a dark and rainy night, when I get to stay home — seems like it might be the right time.
I am too busy to write here, but I guess the dishes, the laundry, the sweeping and the paperwork will have to wait a little longer, because I am so in love with this November day, 
I have to write it down. It would take even more time if I were to write a letter to the grandchildren about it, so they will have to wait, too.
The sky and the clouds! It must be that rain in October and November make for a splendid season, and not just because of the lovely damp-but-mild feeling of the air. As I understand, the rain somehow makes the leaf colors brighter. I drove past a vineyard last week that surprised me so — the colors of the leaves were not just the usual red and yellow and orange, but wide-ranging in deep purples and pinks as well. In my garden the pomegranates have not started turning, and the snowball bush barely.
But I have color. My purples are, or should be, my figs. I think this year’s crop is going to be a big loss, because of the relatively cool summer. Yesterday I saw this single fruit ripening. This morning, a meddlesome crow had tasted it and also found it not ready.
A nasturtium is blooming, and the tithonia still going pretty strong. Yesterday I picked more zinnias, again, to replace those that were turning brown in this vase where I’ve been able to just renew the bouquet in part every few days. But this week may truly be the end, unless the rainy weather keeps the frost off. That would be okay with me.
Yesterday evening was when our neighborhood trash cans are set out at the curb to be emptied the next morning. I wanted to cut enough plant material to fill my yard waste bin, so I worked on cutting the asparagus fronds that are turning gold. I had no sooner begun but gentle raindrops began falling on my head, carrying on another autumn tradition.
The milkweed I cut to the ground last month, as it had been wasted by aphids as is its usual late summer fate, has sent up a new and fresh shoot, green and tender and untouched by any hardship. It won’t last long, but in the meantime it cheers my heart and makes food for next summer’s valiant show.
As long as this mild weather continues, I can put off another task of my housework: carrying wood, building fires and dealing with all the mess around the stove. But as soon as that becomes necessary again, I’ll have one more activity that makes me happy. For today, I am happy with my breadmaking, washing dishes, and wandering around the autumn garden.
This post that is very fallish in more than one way, I am sharing again nine years later. It is about Lin Yutang, whose writings my late husband and I were reading aloud together, during the illness that was to end his earthly life only a few months later. Much of what I read during that period is very foggy in my mind at this point, and many of those and other books from the past keep calling me back, especially when I read my own reviews.
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If you like thought-provoking quotes as much as I do, you might sometime run across one by the eloquent Lin Yutang. I find that I did have a quote by him about autumn in my files, so that is probably how he came under my radar recently, long enough for me to decide to borrow his book The Importance of Living from the library. It was in the closed stacks, and looks old and Chinese. But as Samuel Butler said, “The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them,” and for me, Lin Yutang is definitely a new and exciting discovery.
I expected a small book of proverbs, perhaps, but The Importance of Living is a large conversational and philosophical treatise that I won’t be able
to read in bed. I may have to buy a copy, because in the very first paragraph of the preface I found beautifully written lines that drew me in to his mind and his ruminations:
“Very much contented am I to lie low, to cling to the soil, to be of kin to the sod. My soul squirms comfortably in the soil and sand and is happy. Sometimes when one is drunk with this earth, one’s spirit seems so light that he thinks he is in heaven. But actually he seldom rises six feet above the ground.”
I opened the book randomly in the middle and there, also, his words were worth thinking about as poetry or motivational talk. Did someone very gifted translate the works of this Chinese man? No, he wrote in English in such a graceful way that it is pure joy to read him aloud.
Lin Yutang was born in China in 1895 of Chinese Christian parents. His father was a pastor and a very progressive, forward-thinking man who made sure that Lin learned his Bible stories and went to the schools that produced the best speakers of English. He eventually got a degree from Harvard and another from Leipzig University.
I began to read The Importance of Living aloud with Mr. Glad. I usually do the reading because I enjoy it more than he does, and I immediately noticed the easy flow of Lin’s prose and the equally smooth progression of ideas. Everything he says makes perfect sense given his worldview in 1937, and at that time he was no longer a Christian.
What happened? Mr. Glad and I were very curious, because we had information Lin didn’t have at the time; we knew that later in life he would return to the faith and live to write about it, in his book From Pagan to Christian. So we stopped reading Importance and started in on the book about his spiritual journey that he wrote about 20 years later.
Putting together what he says in the relatively little we have read of him so far, I can tell you this about Lin’s first change of mind: As soon as he came of age to notice, he realized that he had not received the usual Chinese philosophical or literary heritage, much of which was typically learned through the theater; the theater was forbidden to Lin and his siblings who were in some ways raised as Puritans. He hadn’t taken the time to learn to write beautiful calligraphy, either, so he found that he was by Chinese standards completely uncivilized. At this point the one very Chinese thing he did know was intense shame.
He felt he had to go back and learn to be an authentic Chinese man, and having learned as a child the diligence and study habits of a Puritan, he did a very thorough job of learning Chinese philosophy and literature, not to mention a stunningly broad understanding of Western culture. This knowledge base combined with the ability to think and write about all that he has figured out — or is figuring out, as the story evolves — makes him fascinating to me.
We haven’t progressed very far in either of these books, but having this articulate author “friend” to explain Chinese culture and history to me from the inside has given me an interest in that part of the world that I have always lacked. So I hope to read more, and I expect to have more to share. But for now, I’ll close with his quote from My Country and My People about the 
seasons of the year.
“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colours are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring,nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content.”
This meditation seems to me an expression of a perspective that could be both Chinese, as he felt at the time, and truly Christian. I’m looking forward to reading more of the kindly wisdom of Lin Yutang.
