An Autumn Sonata

No words or pictures can truly describe the beauty and melancholy of an English autumn. One could only experience it unfolding day by day before one's own eyes; each day like a mosaic from a painting more beautiful than the one before, each day like the last cacophonic burst of a musical splendour before the approaching doom. The sharp chill in the air, the mythic temporal harmony rising from somewhere deep inside, the chirping of birds, the silent prayer to let time stop – that’s how the contemplation of autumn appears to me.

The change of season also reminds me, strangely enough, of another city thousands of miles south: a city which I had known and loved so intimately, which had been my homeland, and makes me feel at exile anywhere else in the world. Normally around this time of the year, winter slowly starts descending on the smog-filled rickety streets of that city, which had now been left behind by an entire generation. What had once been beautiful is now only a helpless haunting memory; like life itself, an endless elegiac yearning.

Ithaca, as always continues to remain elusive, hiding behind the perennial mist, forever beyond understanding…

October 26, 2009