fall leaves fall

i've started studying again.

and this time, it's not a short online writing course, but a three-year-long correspondence degree.

BA honours in english, through UNISA.

it's something that i've been wanting to do for a long time, and right now, its forcing me to read a lot of information that i consciously avoided in my undergraduate degree.

historical and literary overviews about medieval english, and analyses of thousand year old literature that i never thought i'd be interested in are suddenly relevant.

surprisingly, i now even have the motivation and purpose to actually read all the poetry anthologies that i bought in first year.

heavy ones, and ones that looked small, but were deceptively dense and small typed.

with the help of footnotes, some old english poems even make sense.

still inextricably bound to unchanging human experience.

while browsing through the other thousand pages of the new penguin book of english verse, i also came across some other poems, by emily bronte, written in the 1800s.

an especially apt one called "remembrance".

it reminded me that my delayed and intense reading habits haven't only been the result of renewed interest, but also a convenient way to distract me from recent traumatic events.

unlike the narrator in the poem, the loss has not been immediate to me in particular, but the deaths of two people i spent time with at various stages of my life has been enough to make me very sad.

not so much sad for myself, but for the people who have been broken by their departure, both the result of tragic motor accidents.

both their lives were cut short so prematurely, one just before a very significant part of her life, and it's made me reconsider things, especially the concept of age.

in another poem, untitled, bronte also speaks about the change of seasons, the shift from autumn to winter, most visible by the death of flowers and the falling of leaves.

there are only a few trees in my neighbourhood that make the slow change from "fall" to winter in various shades of yellow and red, like the ones outside the bank building opposite brooklyn mall in fehrsen street.

but they are enough to make me think that this cycle of semi-death and rebirth, so visible around us in plants and weather at the change of seasons, doesn't really apply to humans.

we shed epithelial cells, we lose hair and regrow our fingernails, but i don't think we get to have the same tactile, mass-scale shedding, loss, and regrowth, like deciduous trees do.

when we fall, we fall forever.

which makes me think that growing old, despite its associations with potential incapacitation, illness and frustration, is really a privilege.