Autumnal Beethoven

The train that I'm on, headed south to Washington DC, is traveling through the height of autumn, a preview of the beauty we will be seeing very soon in New York.  How lucky we are to have autumn.  Just as the sun is creeping away the leaves burst into flames, a quieter more noble light, something that echoes the inner fading.  It is very special, perhaps a blessed thing to be connected to this earthly rhythm, to see around me something that I cannot express in words, to share something with the trees, a secret that only we know, and perhaps that all people know, but cannot share with one another.  The trees are our translators.

And also to Beethoven goes this autumnal gratitude.  Especially to late Beethoven.  Just as I cannot express the feeling of autumn to others, so too is Beethoven forever to be in the crystallized deep sadness and solitude of his last years which gave rise to the longing and desperate acceptance of his late works.  I cannot thank him.  If I could, he might not exist as I know him.  We cannot exist other than isolated companions, and he not knowing that I would exist, that all the others who needed him would exist, writing into himself with some faith that we all find something in the trees in fall.