American Seasons. Teale.

The American Seasons
Edwin Way Teale
New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950/1976.

Why read it? The seasons take different forms in different parts of America.

Traveled through the seasons across the country. Prepared by reading innumerable books, articles and scientific monographs. Why write the book? Wanted to save the transient from oblivion. Books have lives of their own. “When a book is published nobody knows where or when it will be read, or who will read it.” “Readers are fine but re-readers are better.” The river of water and the river of time flow on, but the printed page does not change…. to bring to life the conditions and surroundings of a former time.”

To give the reader a flavor of Teale’s insights into the seasons, below are some of his thoughts and discoveries about spring.

February is the shortest and longest month of the twelve. “Nobody knows exactly where spring begins.” “There is an exhilaration in motion itself.” “The eternal illusion of the traveler is the feeling that he is leaving his troubles behind.” “…the line of moonlight across the water—the ‘moonglade’ of the New Englanders….” “At that instant, at thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds past six o’clock in the morning on the 21st of March, the sun’s center was directly above the equator, the vernal equinox had arrived; night and day were of equal length; it was spring, officially spring all over the North American continent. It was spring where snow lay drifted under balsams in northern Maine; it was spring where crows settled on black and frozen bottom land in Illinois; it was spring where eucalyptus trees lifted shaggy trunks in sunshine, beside the Pacific.”

The sounds of birds that resemble words. “The main thing I learn…is my ignorance.” What do you think of when you hear the word “spring”? The differences in the appearance of the roads we travel. “Here was the heart of New England; people ended sentence on a rising inflection, a kind of vocal question mark that revealed an aversion to reckless speech and a cautious attitude of mind.” “Like a sound, spring spreads and spreads until it is swallowed up in space; like the wind, it moves across the map invisible; we see it only in its effects.” “For spring is like life: you never grasp it entire; you touch it here, there; you know it only in parts and fragments.”

Best Sentences:
“One aspect of the correspondence [between readers and the author of this book] that has brought special satisfaction is the number of letters I have received from people who have found in re-reading the books some solace or relief in times of trouble or grief or intolerable strain; losing themselves in the journeys, they have felt drawn closer to the calmness and steadiness and timelessness of nature.”

“Season merges with season in a slow transition into another life.”