'Now October has come again'

 I wonder whether any American writer saw as much as Thomas Wolfe.

Louis L’Amour thought Wolfe’s powers of observation were remarkable and cited a passage in Of Time and the River about the coming of October. It’s long — Chapter 39 in the novel. But these paragraphs will give you a sense of it:

 

Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big you cannot say the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails; just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up: the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling about you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun, so that you cannot say where sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground and where the leaves.

Meanwhile the Palisades are melting in massed molten colours, the season swings along the nation, and a little later in the South dense woodings on the hill begin to glow and soften, and when they smell the burning wood-smoke in Ohio children say: ‘I’ll bet that there’s a forest fire in Michigan.’ And the mountaineer goes hunting down in North Carolina; he stays out late with mournful flop-eared hounds, a rind of moon comes up across the rude lift of the hills: what do his friends say to him when he stays out late? Full of hoarse innocence and laughter, they will say: ‘Mister, yore ole woman’s goin’ to whup ye if ye don’t go home.’”

 

I’m marking the day. Wolfe was born Oct. 3, 1900, in Asheville, N.C., and died Sept. 15, 1937 of miliary tuberculosis.

• Sources: Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935. Project Gutenberg has it here: 

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301021h.html

Chapter 39 begins Book III.

Louis L’Amour’s remark is in Education of a Wandering Man; New York: Bantam Books, 1989, p. 125.