Autumn is clarifying in a way that has very little to do with mood. The change is mostly optical, and once it has been noticed it is difficult to stop noticing.
The light arrives sideways
A high summer sun comes down nearly vertically and flattens everything it lands on. An October sun comes in low and crosses a surface rather than pressing on it, and anything with texture, raised paint, worn stone, old plaster, woven cloth, recovers a depth that three months ago it simply did not have. Nothing about the object has changed. The angle has.
The year has stopped adding
By late October the year has largely finished acquiring things. What is going to be read this year is mostly bought, what is going to be seen is mostly open, and the list has stopped growing. That turns attention from gathering to using, which is a quieter activity and a more satisfying one. Nicole Brachetti Peretti finds the shift arrives on its own around this point in the calendar, without any decision being taken.
Shorter afternoons give an hour edges
When daylight runs out at a known hour, an hour spent looking acquires a shape it does not have in June. The limit is not a loss. A bounded afternoon is easier to spend well than an unbounded one, which is why so little gets properly looked at in the middle of summer.
Colour behaves differently
The other optical change is in what the daylight itself is carrying. Late autumn light is warmer than summer light, and a warm light landing on a cool surface does something to the colour that no description quite captures and no photograph reproduces. Works that looked chilly in July can turn companionable by the end of October, and a few that looked generous in high summer go quiet. Neither reading is the correct one. Both are the work in particular weather.
What carries into November
Whatever is still working at the end of October tends to keep working. The habits that survive a month of shortening afternoons are generally the ones built on something other than enthusiasm, and they carry over without needing to be restarted. The ones that have quietly stopped are easier to let go at the turn of a month than in the middle of a week.
That is most of what the season shows clearly, and none of it requires acting on. The art pages hold the month's looking, the reading notes hold the month's books, and the note on keeping a journal of looking covers the part that makes any of it retrievable in a year's time. More from Nicole Brachetti Peretti on the blog as November begins.