It literally touches all one’s senses

Autumn is here

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The weather of heaven will be bright autumn, I always think.

Louise Bogan
Letter to Theodore Roethke
3rd October 1935

—What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters, 1920-1970

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At no other time [than Autumn], it seems to me, does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Letter to his wife, Clara
13th September 1907

—Letters on Cézanne

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When you were an infant in Italy I was very disconcerted to be told that much of the Italian population had never seen the beauties of the autumn foliage in Vermont and New Hampshire. High in the Abruzzi there are stands of Aspen and Poplar that turn yellow in the fall and they seem to think this adequate. I feel that this explains some of their governmental instability. A people who have never experienced autumn foliage are inclined to be backward. The fact that California has no autumn foliage might have accounted for Reagan's election as Governor.

John Cheever
Letter to his son, Fred
23rd September 1981

—The Letters of John Cheever

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Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

George Eliot
Letter to Maria Lewis
1st October 1841

—George Eliot’s Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals

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Can you feel the autumn where you are? It seems to hang in the air here, and sharpen my senses, and again I feel a sense of a great waste in my life. We must go again up that road to the wood where we found the scarlet toadstool and listen to the wind in the trees. I’m sure it’s beautiful at this time of year. Here the moon is large and lemon-yellow and drifts up into the sky at night like a hollow phosphorescent fungoid growth. Do you watch it?

Philip Larkin
Letter to his mother
23rd August 1953

—Philip Larkin: Letters Home

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It is really autumn now. A week ago the thermometer was at 83 and this morning there is frost on the ground! But such lovely days, with that lovely light over the ridge at sunset. I don’t dislike it, only my nose and knees are cold when I wake up. I am busy taking the garden to pieces, pulling out the dead annuals, cutting down the dead stalks. And everything I plant now in their places is for you.

Vita Sackville-West
Letter to Harold Nicolson
26th September 1926

—Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

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It is warm, misty and semi-autumnal, and lovely to look at, lovely to feel. Feel, smell, look at—one can do all three with this kind of day. It literally touches all one’s senses. One becomes both a painter and a collectionneur, buying the picture nature holds up, but feeling one has had a hand in it, an eye in selecting it, the flash of genius in the joy of creating it.

Janet Flanner
Letter to Natalia Danesi Murray
19th September 1963

—Darlinghissima: Letters To A Friend

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The autumn here is just beyond words—you must see it someday. One clear gold day after another—with the trees flowering into flame. All its sadness is a triumphant sadness. It is full of glory. I got up very early to get breakfast and it was absolutely still outside and gold except for the continual short broken sound of leaves falling one by one (no wind). Like music it was.

May Sarton
Letter to Juliette Huxley
17th October 1937

—May Sarton: Among the Usual Days

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Why do I like the first days of autumn more than those of spring? Certainly I have passed beyond my love for the pallid poetry of falling leaves and moonlit mists! But this golden colour enchants me. There is a sad, intoxicating perfume everywhere. I keep thinking of great feudal hunts, of life as it was lived in the châteaux. There is the sound of stags belling beside a lake; the wind blows through the woods; flames leap high in the vast fireplaces.

Gustave Flaubert
Letter to Louise Colet
September 1853

—The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert

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There is something about the coming of fall that makes people conscious of their own insecurity. Just as squirrels step up the pace in the annual nutgathering festival, human beings begin to think a little bit more seriously about the prospects of the winter ahead—and most of them show some sort of reaction. Mine, in this case, is writing a letter home.

Hunter S. Thompson
Letter to his mother
28th August 1957

—The Proud Highway

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Last night it began to rain, and has kept up ever since, and now there’s that lovely cool-cold in the air, and everything smells a little like metal and farewell, and this is the smell I most love in the world: the first breath of autumn.

Louise Bogan
Letter to Morton D. Zabel
22nd August 1937

—What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters, 1920-1970

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As long as autumn lasts I won’t have enough hands, canvas or colours to paint the beautiful things that I see.

Vincent van Gogh
Letter to his brother, Theo
25th September 1888

—The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

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All photos are from Getty.