There is a lovely liminality to autumn — this threshold time between the centripetal exuberance of summer and the season for tending to the inner garden, as Rilke wrote of winter. Autumn is a living metaphor for the necessary losses that shape our human lives: What falls away reveals the imperative beneath the superfluous, making what remains all the more precious — the fleeting colors, the fading light, the embering warmth. It is a teacher in the art of letting go — what has ceased to nourish, what has lost its vital spark, what no longer serves.
Hardly anyone has captured the singular, unphotographable magic of autumn more vividly than Richard Adams (May 10, 1920–December 24, 2016) in this passage from his 1973 classic Watership Down (public library), painting “a fine, clear evening in mid-October”:
Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man’s beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.
Once, while writing my first book, I lived on a lush volcanic island balding with so-called civilization, lawnmowers muffling its birdsong to turn its jungles into golf courses.
I watched waves taller than factory chimneys break into cliffs black as spacetime, making mansions look like a maquette of life.
I beheld the ancient indifferent faces of turtles older than the light bulb hatching their young under the NO TRESPASSING sign on a billionaire’s private beach.
I looked into the open mouth of the volcano taunting the sky in the language of time.
I kept thinking about how those fault lines between the elemental and the ephemera of human life most readily expose our gravest civilizational foible: regarding nature as something to conquer, to neuter, to tame, “forgetting that we are nature too,” forgetting that we are taming our own wildness, neutering our very souls.
Jay Griffiths offers a mighty antidote in her 2006 masterpiece Wild: An Elemental Journey (public library) — the product of “many years’ yearning” pulling her “toward unfetteredness, toward the sheer and vivid world,” learning to think with the mind of a mountain and feel with the heart of a forest, searching for “something shy, naked and elemental — the soul.” What emerges is both an act of revolt (against the erasure of the wild, against the domestication of the soul) and an act of reverence (for the irrepressible in nature, for landscape as a form of knowledge, for life on Earth, as improbable and staggering as love.)
A century and a half after Thoreau “went to the woods to live deliberately” (omitting from his famed chronicle of spartan solitude the fresh-baked doughnuts and pies his mother and sister brought him every Sunday), Griffiths spent seven years slaking her soul on the world’s wildness, from the Amazon to the Arctic, trying “to touch life with the quick of the spirit,” impelled by “the same ancient telluric vigor that flung the Himalayas up to applaud the sky.” She writes:
I was looking for the will of the wild… The only thing I had to hold on to was the knife-sharp necessity to trust to the elements my elemental self.
I wanted to live at the edge of the imperative, in the tender fury of the reckless moment, for in this brief and pointillist life, bright-dark and electric, I could do nothing else.
[…]
The human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not.
It all began by getting lost in “the wasteland of the mind, in a long and dark depression” that left her unable to walk or write, “pathless, bleak and bewildered, not knowing which way to turn.” (A decade later, Griffiths would write an entire book about that discomposing yearlong episode of manic depression.) Searching for “the octaves of possibilities,” reckoning with “the maybes of the mind,” yearning for release from the supermarket aisles of the psyche, she set out to find the savage antipode to “this chloroform world where human nature is well schooled, tamed from childhood on, where the radiators are permanently on mild and the windows are permanently closed.” She writes:
I felt an urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the color of ice an invitation: come. The forest was a fiddler, wickedly good, eyes intense and shining with a fast dance. Every leaf in every breeze was a toe tapping out the same rhythm and every mountaintop lifting out of cloud intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with inaudible melodies that I strained to hear, my eyes yearning for the horizon of sound. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel — take flight. All that is wild is winged — life, mind and language — and knows the feel of air in the soaring “flight, silhouetted in the primal.”
She lived for months with a hill tribe in the forests of the Burmese border, lost all her toenails climbing Kilimanjaro, met “cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelized them,” felt “what it is like to whimper with sheer loneliness on a Christmas Day in a jungle on the other side of the world,” learned to live in the seasons and the elements, “right within nature because there is nothing that is not nature.”
She reflects:
To me, humanity is not a strain on wilderness as some seem to think. Rather the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air. Kerneled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. To the rebel soul in everyone, then, the right to wear feathers, drink stars and ask for the moon… We are — every one of us — a force of nature, though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart.
Pulsating beneath the passionate poetics is an indictment and a beckoning. A decade after Maya Angelou channeled the selfsame polarity of human nature in her staggering space-bound poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Griffiths writes:
There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.
Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being, anesthetizing the urgency of our mortality — that wellspring of everything beautiful and enduring we make. What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against air con and asphalt, against our self-expatriation from our own nature:
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth. Wildness is the universal songline, sung in green gold, which we recognize the moment we hear it. What is wild is what drives the honeysuckle, what wills the dragonfly, shoves the wind and compels the poem. Wildness is insatiable for life; neither truly knows itself without the other. Wildness… sucks up the now, it blazes in your eyes and it glories in everyone who willfully goes their own way.
“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought,”Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) urged in her prophetic Parable of the Talents, written in the 1990s and set in the 2020s. Her words remain a haunting reminder that our rights are founded upon our responsibilities: “To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” There are few terrors greater than the knowledge that we are free to change the world with our choices.
Considering her Earthseed series “fundamentally about social power,” she reflects on the disquieting forces tearing American society apart:
Some people insist that all civilizations have to rise and fall — like the British before us — but we have brought this on ourselves. What you see today has happened before: a few powerful people take over with the approval of a class below them who has nothing to gain and even much to lose as a result. It’s like the Civil War: most of the men who fought to preserve slavery were actually being hurt by it. As farmers they could not compete with the plantations, and they could not even hire themselves out as labor in competition with the slaves who could be hired out more cheaply by their owners. But they supported the slave system anyway.
Many people just need someone to feel superior to to make themselves feel better. You see Americans doing it now, unfortunately, while voting
against their own interests. It is that kind of shortsighted behavior that is destroying us.
While this perilous inner rupture seems only magnified in the America of our day, Whitman, far-seeing and unafraid to challenge the will of the world, warned about it an epoch earlier, at a time when most of us were not rightful citizens and were denied the power to shape fate with our vote. In his enduring reckoning with democracy predicated on a truly feminist society, he wrote:
Of all dangers to a nation… there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn — they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.
It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice cream and orgasms, gets to yearn and to suffer and to love.
Perhaps the most hopeful thing about being alive is that we are never finished and complete. Perhaps the most exasperating is that we are never entirely new, that we are nested with every self we have ever been, each stage of our development shaped by the singular needs and tensions of each preceding stage, our character shaped by how those needs and tensions were met and resolved.
The influential psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (June 15, 1902–May 12, 1994), who coined the term identity crisis and readily recognized that “an individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history,” took up this tessellated question of our incremental becoming in his 1950 book Childhood and Society (public library) — an investigation of “the growth and the crises of the human person as a series of alternative basic attitudes.”
Erikson identifies eight sequential stages of human development, each marked by a particular battery of opposite psychic charges — one a positive developmental achievement that strengthens one’s self-trust, world-trust, and creative potency, the other a danger that fosters antagonism, isolation, and despair. He writes:
The strength acquired at any stage is tested by the necessity to transcend it in such a way that the individual can take chances in the next stage with what was most vulnerably precious in the previous one.
[…]
There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding, which constitutes a new hope and a new responsibility for all.
[…]
In view of the dangerous potentials of man’s long childhood, it is well to look back at the blueprint of the life-stages and to the possibilities of guiding the young of the race while they are young.
The first intense experience of life is separation — infant and mother are no longer one, and the infant must learn to trust that the mother is still there even when she vanishes from view. Erikson writes:
The infant’s first social achievement, then, is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability. Such consistency, continuity, and sameness of experience provide a rudimentary sense of ego identity.
[…]
This forms the basis in the child for a sense of identity which will later combine a sense of being “all right,” of being oneself.
This kind of trust is the foundation of confidence, for it is also training ground for the self-trust necessary to withstand separation, to have faith in one’s inherent okayness. The absence of such maternal consistency and continuity, Erikson observes, may be one of the most difficult cards to be dealt in life, predisposing people to habitual “depressive states” in later stages.
This is also the stage in which we learn to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins — the vital distinction that enables us to differentiate between the rewards of interdependence and the dangers of codependence, to navigate the myriad traps that strew the meeting ground between self and other. Erikson writes:
The early process of differentiation between inside and outside [is] the origin of projection and introjection which remain some of our deepest and most dangerous defense mechanisms. In introjection we feel and act as if an outer goodness had become an inner certainty. In projection, we experience an inner harm as an outer one: we endow significant people with the evil which actually is in us… These mechanisms are, more or less normally, reinstated in acute crises of love, trust, and faith in adulthood and can characterize irrational attitudes toward adversaries and enemies in masses of “mature” individuals.
2. AUTONOMY VS. SHAME AND DOUBT (18 MONTHS-3 YEARS)
The hallmark of the second stage is a physiological development that becomes an analogue for one of the most important psychological skills in life — to hold on and to let go, central to such fundamental capacities as intimacy, compassion, tenacity, and forgiveness. Erikson writes:
Muscular maturation sets the stage for experimentation with two simultaneous sets of social modalities: holding on and letting go. As is the case with all of these modalities, their basic conflicts can lead in the end to either hostile or benign expectations and attitudes. Thus, to hold can become a destructive and cruel retaining or restraining, and it can become a pattern of care: to have and to hold. To let go, too, can turn into an inimical letting loose of destructive forces, or it can become a relaxed “to let pass” and “to let be.”
This is the stage at which the experience of shame first emerges and we must learn to have our “basic faith in existence” not jeopardized by the embarrassments of getting things wrong. (“Shame is an experience that affects and is affected by the whole self,” the pioneering sociologist and philosopher Helen Merrell Lynd would write a few years later in her insightful take on shame and the search for identity.) For the infant at this stage, Erikson observes, shame springs from the emergence of a new developmental phenomenon: the “sudden violent wish to have a choice, to appropriate demandingly, and to eliminate stubbornly.” He writes:
Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at: in one word, self-conscious. One is visible and not ready to be visible… Shame is… essentially rage turned against the self.
With an eye to the development of these crucial capacities for holding on, letting go, and withstanding shame, he adds:
This stage, therefore, becomes decisive for the ratio of love and hate, cooperation and willfulness, freedom of self-expression and its suppression, From a sense of self-control without loss of self-esteem comes a lasting sense of good will and pride; from a sense of loss of self-control and of foreign overcontrol comes a lasting propensity for doubt and shame.
3. INITIATIVE VS. GUILT (AGES 3-5)
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Kenny’s Window — his little-known philosophical first children’s book.
As we begin to take initiative in completing tasks, we develop what Erikson calls “anticipatory rivalry” — which may be another word for envy — toward those who complete the same tasks better. Here, we learn that what the world asks of us often requires the repression and inhibition of our own hopes and desires.
The danger of this, if we successfully cede desire to demand, is a sense of self-righteousness — “often the principal reward of goodness,” Erikson astutely observes a decade before Joan Didion admonished against mistaking self-righteousness for morality, a tendency painfully pronounced in our own time of virtue signaling.
This is the stage at which our natural creativity and capacity for play begin being sublimated to our civilizational cult of productivity. School starts, forcing the child to part with earlier hopes and wishes as their “exuberant imagination is tamed and harnessed… to be a worker.”
The danger in this overidentification with accomplishment, building upon the earlier development of envy, is “a sense of inadequacy and inferiority,” which may lead the child to believe themselves “doomed to mediocrity or inadequacy.” (This, of course, is the perennial danger of all self-comparison, acute even for adults in today’s broadcast selfhood of social media.)
Here begins our concern with what we appear to be to others versus what we feel we are — an integration that marks the emergence of our ego identity. Erikson considers the many guises in which the great danger of this stage — role confusion — can appear:
To keep themselves together [adolescents] temporarily overidentify, to the point of apparent complete loss of identity, with the heroes of cliques and crowds. This initiates the stage of “falling in love,” which is by no means entirely, or even primarily, a sexual matter — except where the mores demand it. To a considerable extent adolescent love is an attempt to arrive at a definition of one’s identity by projecting one’s diffused ego image on another and by seeing it thus reflected and gradually clarified. This is why so much of young love is conversation.
In a passage of far-reaching insight and extraordinary empathy for the vulnerabilities of the psyche, which most people would rather fault than fathom, he adds:
Young people can also be remarkably clannish, and cruel in their exclusion of all those who are “different,” in skin color or cultural background, in tastes and gifts, and often in such petty aspects of dress and gesture as have been temporarily selected as the signs of an in-grouper or out-grouper. It is important to understand (which does not mean condone or participate in) such intolerance as a defense against a sense of identity confusion. For adolescents not only help one another temporarily through much discomfort by forming cliques and by stereotyping themselves, their ideals, and their enemies; they also perversely test each other’s capacity to pledge fidelity. The readiness for such testing also explains the appeal which simple and cruel totalitarian doctrines have on the minds of the youth.
This is the stage at which emotional integrity develops — we learn the particular form of self-trust and self-respect that come from making commitments and keeping them, even when it is difficult to do so. The self-permission to break promises and cancel plans stems from a failure at the developmental achievement of this stage and the price we pay for it, quite apart from disappointing and hurting others, is always an erosion of self-trust and self-respect. Erikson writes:
The young adult, emerging from the search for and the insistence on identity… is ready for intimacy, that is, the capacity to commit himself to concrete affiliations and partnerships and to develop the ethical strength to abide by such commitments, even though they may call for significant sacrifices and compromises.
Observing that this is when we first face the “fear of ego loss” in situations that may require compromise and sacrifice, he adds:
The avoidance of such experiences because of a fear of ego loss may lead to a deep sense of isolation and consequent self-absorption.
The great challenge of this stage is that “intimate, competitive, and combative relations are experienced with and against the selfsame people.” It is necessary to learn to tolerate and resolve such tensions, or otherwise we face the great danger of this stage — isolation, which Erikson defines as “the avoidance of contacts which commit to intimacy.”
7. GENERATIVITY VS. STAGNATION (AGES 40-65)
Art by Carson Ellis from What Is Love? by Mac Barnett
Erikson counters our culture’s hyperfocus on children’s dependence on parents with the insistence that the older generation is also dependent on the younger, for elders “need to be needed.” (A generation before him, Jane Ellen Harrison addressed this with great geniality and great percipience in her meditation on Old Age and Youth.)
Erikson terms the animating achievement of this life-stage generativity, which he defines as “the concern in establishing and guiding the next generation,” noting that it is “meant to include such more popular synonyms as productivity and creativity, which, however, cannot replace it.”
Whether generativity manifests as physically producing the next generation through procreation or contributing to the world through acts of creation, a failure to attain it results in “a pervading sense of stagnation and personal impoverishment.”
“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her sixties as she reflected on the art of growing older. That we must die is precisely what impels us to render our lives valuable. We can only do so, Erikson argues, by moving through the prior seven stages toward this final fruition of what he calls ego integrity — “the ego’s accrued assurance of its proclivity for order and meaning,” built of our adaptation “to the triumphs and disappointments adherent to being.”
[Ego integrity] is a post-narcissistic love of the human ego—not of the self — as an experience which conveys some world order and spiritual sense, no matter how dearly paid for. It is the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions.
One consequence of this acceptance is “a new, a different love of one’s parents.” Another is that “death loses its sting,” for the fear of death stems from the lack of a sense of cohesion and consonance with universal life — a lack that takes shape as despair. (This may be why D.H. Lawrence called death “the last wonder” and wrote: “If you want to live in peace on the face of the earth / Then build your ship of death, in readiness / For the longest journey.”)
Erikson ends with one of the most potent formulae in the science of the psyche:
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
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