As September, always my favourite month of the year rolls around I look forward to Autumn, my favourite season, a time for conkers and new stationary. The embers of summer and give way to the coolness of Autumn - to me hot September days are more beautiful than those in July or August as I know each one might be the last of the year. By October the light itself seems to smell of falling leaves and changing colours - it is softer and more refracted. The year is beginning to die, but like a cut rose on the turn is at is most beautiful at this moment.
For our early Autumn issue we are both looking back and forward. As I edited photographs of Itchenor and West Wittering (part of a forthcoming exhibiton project) already an image of blue sky and stark shadows of the hot morning sun on the beach make me nostalgic for a summer which is slipping away.
Arnab Chatterjee reflects on a modern summer expedition to Brazil in diaries, while in Baghdad Ahmad Ali reviews a book which recounts the Iraq war already several years in past. In fiction Chema Arriza captures the cycle of summer in the Balkans and Gordon Comstock evokes nostalgia that stretches back further - to what it was like to be a teenager around a decade ago.
Endings can be about lessons and letting go, and Charlie Esse concludes his retrospective examination of a slide back into alcoholism with an honesty that invites wisdom.
Recently I have been spending a lot of time listening to friends on either side of relationship issues. Whether for myself, or comforting friends, I usually only hear or know about one side of a romantic situation. Hearing both makes me realize that in any of these discussions, there are four things going on:
First, there's what you said, second there's what you thought that meant. Then, third, there's what they heard you say, and fourth there's what they thought that meant.
Hearing both sides is proving to be a somewhat shocking eye-opener that the first and the third of these points - which logically should be the same - can be very different.
Both people focus on the things that are important to them and remember best what was said that corresponds most closely to what they want and hope for.
This in itself maybe explains why the second and fourth of these things - what the conversation actually meant to each person - can be so differently described by each party that as their confidante I find myself wondering if these two people recounting the convesation to me were actually talking to each other at all.
As ever though, the universe has a knack of sending us not what we want, but what we need. An ending, whether of a relationship or the year is also an opportunity for new beginnings. Henning Hegland is making a new beginning in New York, with the start of the academic year and the first semester of his directing course. His story of getting settled there - the fresh eye that a new start in a new city brings, but also the energy the moving administration requires reminds me that getting started is sometimes as hard work as ending or finishing. Maybe what distinguishes a beginning and an end is not the energy either take, but rather the feeling we have about them - that optimism and hope surrounds a beginning, whereas disappointment or nostalgia surrounds an end.
