I think God was very kind when he gave us the seasons.

I wonder just how bored we'd end up being if life was one long summer, a perpetual sunny summer. I know right now my mother is strongly disagreeing with me, as she maintains that life would be so much more delicious without rain and winter, and most likely that if she ever was planted on a tropical island for the rest of her life, she'd be perfectly happy. To some that might sound like a novel idea-- "always summer"-- how lovely. I like summer very much, but I cannot help but realize how blasé it would become to us if the sun was always shining and glaring, the heat always penetrating, and the clouds never hanging above, comfortingly, softly, strongly. I think the reason I adore summer so much is because I appreciate it after the rain subsides and the puddles evaporate. I adore fall just as much because summer has unknowingly nurtured inside me a hope and craving for wind and cold and umbrellas (although I never use one, but the concept is pretty) and mossy things and ferns and windshield wipers and freezing, frosty mornings and evenings. Each year the seasons unfold with a story of its own-- and while each one is similar to the other-- every year the portrayal of the story is still specialized, unique.

Thank you, God, for all our seasons. I am so glad I don't live in a box.

And thank you for the elongated shadows and the animated, cold, apple air of Autumn.

To speak analogously is to admit that you can't say it directly; you really can't say it at all; it's outside the realm of proven fact. But it is not a coincidence that some of the greatest poetry in the English language is in the form of the sonnet. The haiku is one of the most popular forms of poetry today: what could be more structured?

[Once I was giving a lecture] and the students talked loudly about wanting to be free to dance, to make love, to be themselves. So do I. So we left literature and talked about the body, and I kept asking questions: what is it in you which gives you this freedom? Finally one of the young men, with great reluctance, pulled out the word: skeleton. It is our bones, our structure, which frees us to dance, to make love. Without our structure we would be an imprisoned, amorphous blob of flesh, incapable of response. The amoeba has a minimum of structure, but I doubt if it has much fun.

{L'Engle}

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many placed is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

{C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory}