A Time for Every Season

By LANCE MORROW

The outfield starts to vanish in a thickening whiteness. The umpire gets morally confused. He stands with palms upraised, like a supplicant priest, and stares at the fat crystals falling onto his hands. At last, he calls the game, in wonder and disgust.

A snowstorm in mid-April is a kind of outrage. It is a minor perversion of nature. It makes hairline fractures in the order of things. The earth has schedules. We grow offended when it does not run on time, when our expectations are unseasonably violated.

All spring the weather has been weird: violent, Shakespearean. It might have been worse, of course. In the annus mirabilis of 1811, the air was dense with portents: a comet in the northern sky, an eclipse of the sun. The Eastern U.S. was broiled by ungodly heat and swept by tornadoes and hurricanes. Multitudes of squirrels, in the tens of thousands, were seen migrating south across Kentucky. In 1816 Connecticut had a blizzard on June 6. On the Fourth of July that year, the highest temperature recorded in Savannah, Ga., was 46DEGF The prevailing opinion, for a little while, was that the universe had gone crazy.

Nature has mood swings. But people are probably no longer as temperamental about them as they once were, as barnyard animals are. Ridiculous as it seems, the seasons usually occur now at a certain distance. They have some interest, like landscapes glimpsed out a train window. But they are also a little raw and messy.

In fact, it may be a question whether human beings really want seasons at all. Civilization's ambition for centuries has been to mitigate them, even to abolish them. The seasons in many developed latitudes are rough and unpredictable. Man wanted to subdue them, domesticate them. The logic of Progress has been to lift humanity out of the yearly cycles and into a higher trajectory. Progress was designed to be an ascendant journey, linear and always brightening, not a mere pointless circular plod around the calendar.

Some people have a corrupted idea of Progress. The new U.S. Football League, which is playing its games in spring and early summer, has been nervously founded on a gamble about the sports fan's adaptability to different time zones. There is something spiritually dislocating, even depraved, about football in May. Still, Homo sapiens has adjusted to the idea of having ice hockey's Stanley Cup playoffs proceed at their glacial pace through the same month, so perhaps the content of seasons is just a matter of habit. When man sends colonies into space, he will be able to mount movable, sun-reflecting mirrors to simulate rhythms of night and day and even the terrestrial seasons. If he wished such special effects, he could probably conjure up an occasional blizzard inside the space colony. But he doubtless will follow the longstanding American habit of thinking that outer space should, as much as possible, resemble Southern California. If he does install seasons in the colony, they will be only for the benefit of the vegetables.

Farmers need seasons. In a lovely, squat little verse to the month of March, A.E. Housman wrote: "So braver notes the stormcock sings/ To start the rusted wheel of things,/ And brutes in field and brutes in pen/ Leap that the world goes round again."

Industry and business can proceed in a fluorescent seasonlessness. Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68DEG all year. Air conditioning is one of the serious accomplishments of the 20th century. It produced the Sunbelt. The enclosed suburban shopping mall prefigures those cities of the future that will be entirely domed, like a pheasant under glass. No seasonal variations need be endured.

The preacher of Ecclesiastes gave the list of sublime inevitabilities: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." There was once a cultural geographer named Ellsworth Huntington who suggested--ethnocentrically, his critics later said--that people who lived without seasons could never develop character. So much for the manana cultures. So much, in fact, for San Diego. Such cultures had no Darwinian need for foresight, Huntington thought, no drive to store up nuts for winter. They did not feel that stirring of energy and anticipation and pragmatic dread when the first chill came on, making them think responsibly, in the future tense. Bad weather makes people miserable, and busy. Provide, provide.

The seasons were once the central organizing principle of things. Mankind learned the mysteries, even the tragedies, of limited duration. All of Egyptian civilization coalesced around the annual flooding of the Nile. In the developed countries now, the internal variations of the year begin to have a merely recreational or sentimental interest. They tend to be, at best, decorative and, at worst, inconvenient. It is true that in Minnesota, winter remains a convicted killer. It is also true that things occur in a Southern spring, in north Alabama or Tennessee or the Shenandoah Valley, that go beyond the merely picturesque: a time-lapse film of blossoms opening, that sweet, rich awakening, a sensuous slow motion of nature.

The seasons began by breaking down time into usable units: a time to plow, a time to sow, a time to reap. Distinctly, intensely different periods of the year calibrated time and made it manageable. They enforced disciplines. Now, people often create their own units of usable time without such explicit reference to the external seasons. There are the business seasons and the school seasons. There are model years for cars and fiscal years for budgets. Those man-made schedules are wheels within the abiding great wheel, less noticed now, of the calendar.

People can fragment the year. They can escape it. They can arc not only out of a place but out of a time. They fly in a couple of hours from one season to another: from Chicago's December, say, to Florida's moral equivalent of high summer. Then they fly back into the wan, smudged month that they left, and they are tan. In deep winter, they are exotics walking among all those gray faces at lunchtime like Queequeg on-the streets of Nantucket.

But insulation from the seasons is sometimes disorienting. There is reassurance in those felt variations. Those who are seasonless are adrift in time. It is difficult to get one's bearings in time if one stays too long on Oahu. The seasonless also feel less the sacramental uses of the different times. The seasons are the framework of archetypes, and profane time acquires its deeper meanings as it passes through the frame. Each year, after all, recapitulates the process of a life: birth, youth, maturity, old age and, in deep winter, death. Then the rebirth, when the seasons enact most literally nature's drama of redemption, and life pushes its green shoots out of death. --By Lance Morrow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.