1. September is probably my favourite month. The month when an end and a beginning clash. The summer ends and everybody comes back from the summer changed. There is an old joy feeling, as if the party was ending but not yet, seven am, all a little bit tired, a little bit melancholic, watching sunrise. We also begin, we make new plans and we prepare for the autumn and the winter charged with energy. There is a veil in the light of September. Amy Lowell had a perfect description for its light in her poem September 1918: This afternoon was the color of water falling through sunlight. It is a light that carries the memory of the joyful days of summer and the hint of the coldness that will come with the winter. Imagine sitting with friends with a bottle of wine watching the sunset, covered with a blanket though it’s not cold enough to find yourself feeling just perfect. Sunset and sunrise are also an end and a beginning.
2. For T. S. Eliot, as we all know, the cruellest month was April, as he told us in The Waste Land. The reasons to condemn April for Eliot were: breeding/ lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ memory and desire, stirring/ dull roots with spring rain. I can understand the fears that Mr Eliot managed, but I’m a big knocker against November, as for April, it doesn’t bother me. November, I’ve always thought, is a disgusting month. The month that lionises solitude. In the middle of nowhere, cold as hell yet still not Winter. Rainy. Rainy. And, Rainy. The only use you can give to November is to sit behind the window watching the world storm outside.
3. 1st of September was the beginning of World War II. Now, 2013, we probably are witnessing the beginning of another war in Syria (or, better said, the war was there always but now western countries are looking at it). After the truce of the summer, kids come back
to battle as soldiers do, and it seems the right time to start school or a war. The war metaphor seems always appropriate to anything life related. W. H. Auden, wrote in his poem September, 1, 1939: The unmentionable odour of death/ offends the September night. Personally, I don’t really think that the night cares, the night knows that in another place of the world, there is no war, and somebody sits through it having a good time. Or maybe it does, maybe the night of September, just September night, is specially picky and gets offended quickly and can’t stand smelly corpse. Don’t worry, the autumn leaves will inevitably fall and cover them all.
4. In Prague the cold is slowly but steadily arriving. But still you can sit in the rusty boats anchored in the riverside to read, drink beer and peak to the amazing reds of the sunset while you read. I sit and feel small shivers of innocent cold while I read Consider the Lobster by D. F. Wallace. September 12, 2008, David Foster Wallace committed suicide hanging himself. The best novelist that the 21st century produced had depression. On the date of his death, while his wife was gone he went into the garage, organized his last novel, left it ready for his editor, wrote a two page note and hanged himself. September seems a moment for coming or leaving, ending or beginning, the stakes seem to be high for us, small and unpredictable beings. Septembers keep on going no matter how many wars, suicides, weddings, kisses. Septembers pass, smoothly, they are an uncertain haven, a pit-stop where you just stay in suspension for a few seconds before you leave again to go through the solitude of November and the cruelty of April. Till you can come back to this light, this no-time where all is contained.
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