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Take winter. It is basically uninhabitable. Whenever it shows its true nature, real life bogs to a standstill. Almost no one sincerely likes winter except the oil cartel and the cough-syrup magnates. True, everybody pretends that real life actually goes on. This very effort has inspired some of mankind's most desperate inventions—curling and skiing, to name two. To help foster the illusion of life happening, the Constitution requires Congress to convene each January—and the illusion is sometimes convincing even if the Capitol is often the scene of more commotion than movement. Winter is, in a word, unacceptable.
Then there is spring, the season for simpering adolescents, May flies and impressionable poetasters. Listen to a typical springophile, Poet George Herbert: "Sweet Spring, full of sweet days and roses,/ A box where sweets compacted lie;/ My music shows ..." Hold! Enough! His muse-ack provides sufficient cause to reflect—coolly—on the hard fact that spring was the time when our ancestral tribes built festivals around the rites of blood sacrifice. Moreover, did not Eve accomplish the Fall of Man in the eternal spring of Eden? In cool weather, serpents do not tempt; they grow diffident, recede and hibernate.
Summer? If any abomination so current needs to be reprised, think of it. Drought. Crowded beaches. Sunburn. Poison ivy. McDonald's. Summer is sand between the toes, fleafestations on the cats, movies like New York, New York. Every so-called joy of summer—whether getting wet, beering up or fleeing to the mountains—consists, in its essence, of escaping the suffocating reality of the season. August is so horrible that even dedicated psychiatrists abandon posts and patients for the entire month. Mosquitoes love summer. They hate autumn.
In short, winter is a tomb, spring is a lie, and summer is a pernicious mirage. Thus, if only by some crude law of relativity, autumn is the preferred stock of seasons. Autumn is the truth. It had to be autumn (unless the fabled apple fell unseasonably) that inspired Newton to discover the law of gravity. More books and most of the best come forth in the autumn. In theatrical circles, autumn is spoken of as the season. Autumn is for stamping on ripe grapes. Even now the vintners are prowling the prodigal vines.
No hymning—or hawing—in behalf of autumn should neglect to note that the coming season is a self-contained climactic cycle. It offers every weather—at its end, days icy enough for any sane person, and along the way, those indefinite Indian summers that put the real ones to shame. Fittingly enough, autumn delivers us to Christmas.
Admittedly, the season has imperfections. Yet even some of these—such as pro football and TV premieres—have become popular. On the other hand, autumn's few blemishes tend to be offset, for civilized folk, by that man-made miracle, the World Series. Maybe the saddest defect of autumn in America is the fact the country is so large that some regions do not get to experience it—Southern California, for one. Inhabitants of such deprived places should be encouraged to make-believe. That sort of thing comes easy to any folk not brought firmly back to earth once a year by a fall.
—Frank Trippett