Longing and the Turning of the Year

You do not want the same things in November that you wanted in June. You have never noticed, and it has been true your whole life.

There is a vanity in how we hold our desires. We treat them as products of the self, arrived at through some private history, expressing who we uniquely are. Some of that is true. But a considerable portion of what you feel on a given evening is not about you at all. It is about the light, and how much of it there is, and how long it lasted, and what the temperature did at four in the afternoon. You are an animal that has been kept indoors and given opinions, and underneath the opinions the animal is still keeping time by the sun.

Watch it in yourself over a year and you will stop arguing. Summer wanting is outward and light and slightly careless. It is easily distracted and easily satisfied, and it does not go deep because there is too much happening on the surface for anything to sink. Nobody has ever had a life altering longing in July. The light is too long and the evenings will not close, and desire requires a closed evening to concentrate in.

Then the year turns and everything changes character. The dark comes early and stays, and it puts walls around the evening, and what was diffuse becomes specific. The same want that was pleasant and wandering in June arrives in November with a weight it did not have, and you are startled by it, and you assume something has happened to you. Nothing has happened to you. The room got smaller and the thing that was always there is now unmissable because there is nothing else in the room with it.

This is why winter is honest and summer is not. I have noticed it for years now. The messages change. They become plainer and less defended around the end of October, and by January men are telling me things they would not have gone near in high summer, and they do not know why they have suddenly become brave. They have not become brave. The distractions have been withdrawn and there is nowhere left to look except inward, and once you are looking inward the material is right there and has been all along.

Then February, which is its own condition. Not the drama of deep winter and not the relief of spring. Just the long low grey that goes on and on, and something in that produces a very particular species of longing, patient and unromantic and extremely durable. The men who arrive in February are rarely enthusiastic. They are something better than enthusiastic. They have been sitting with it for four months and they are finished pretending.

And I will tell you the use of knowing this. It gives you a way to stop judging yourself for the shape of the season. When the wanting swells in the dark you will think you have lost some ground you had gained. You have not. The light left. When it lightens again and the thing loosens, you will think you have been cured or have cooled. You have not. The light came back. Neither of those is a verdict on you, and the whole exhausting business of taking your own temperature as though it meant something can be set down.

Want what the season gives you to want. It is going to anyway. You are simply in on it now.