| Falling Leaves and Early Snow
by Kenneth Rexroth
In the years to come they will say,
"They fell like the leaves
In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine."
November has come to the forest,
To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.
The year fades with the white frost
On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,
Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.
Ice forms in the shadows;
Disheveled maples hang over the water;
Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.
Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.
The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,
The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,
The olive, velvety alder leaves,
The scarlet dogwood leaves,
Most poignant of all.
In the afternoon thin blades of cloud
Move over the mountains;
The storm clouds follow them;
Fine rain falls without wind.
The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.
When the rain pauses the clouds
Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.
In the evening the wind changes;
Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.
Kenneth Rexroth, "Falling Leaves and Early Snow" from The Collected Shorter Poems, copyright ©1940 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. (buy now) It's the birthday of astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, born in Marshfield, Missouri (1889), for whom the Hubble Telescope is named. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and received a law degree. He passed the Kentucky bar exam in 1913, but gave up practicing law after one year to return to Chicago for a doctorate in astronomy. "I chucked the law for astronomy," he said, "and I knew that even if I were second- or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered." Hubble went to work at Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, where he discovered that there are other galaxies outside the Milky Way, opening up a whole new field of astronomy. He later discovered that these distant galaxies were moving away from the Milky Way; in other words, he hit upon the concept of the expanding universe, which has been called "the most spectacular astronomical discovery of the 20th century." It's the birthday of the novelist Don DeLillo (1936) (books by this author). He was born in the Bronx, New York, and said: "I became a writer by living in New York and seeing and hearing and feeling all the great, amazing and dangerous things the city endlessly assembles. And I also became a writer by avoiding serious commitment to anything else." He developed a reading habit when he was a teenager, working a summer job as a playground attendant, a "parkie": "I was told to wear a white T-shirt and brown pants and brown shoes and a whistle around my neck — which they provided — the whistle. But I never acquired the rest of the outfit. I wore blue jeans and checkered shirts and kept the whistle in my pocket and just sat on a park bench disguised as an ordinary citizen. And this is where I read Faulkner, As I Lay Dying and Light in August. And I got paid for it." All that reading eventually led to an interest in writing, particularly in emulating Hemingway, who was one of his early heroes. After college, he took a job as an advertising copywriter, but quit just as he was getting good at it, he said. He began his first novel, Americana (1971), in 1966. "I don't always know when or where an idea first hits the nervous system, but I remember Americana. I was sailing in Maine with two friends, and we put into a small harbor on Mt. Desert Island. And I was sitting on a railroad tie waiting to take a shower, and I had a glimpse of a street maybe fifty yards away and a sense of beautiful old houses and rows of elms and maples and a stillness and wistfulness — the street seemed to carry its own built-in longing. And I felt something, a pause, something opening up before me. It would be a month or two before I started writing the book and two or three years before I came up with the title Americana, but in fact it was all implicit in that moment." It was in the process of writing that book that he finally began to see himself as a writer. It's his 1997 Cold War epic Underworld that critic Martin Amis said marked "the ascension of a great writer." DeLillo didn't expect much of the book when he finished it, feeling that, at 800 pages and with more than 100 characters, it was too complicated. He published his 15th novel, Point Omega, in 2010, and a collection called The Angel Esmeralda, in 2011. The book gathers nine of his short stories over the span of his career. His most recent novel, his 17th, is The Silence (2020). Don DeLillo said: "I've never thought about myself in terms of a career. ... I don't have a career, I have a typewriter." It's the birthday of writer Nadine Gordimer (books by this author), born in Springs, South Africa (1923). When she was a child, her mother had a crush on the family doctor, and she used Gordimer's chronic rapid heartbeat as an excuse to call him out on lengthy house calls. The mother had a taste for drama, and a part of her enjoyed having a fragile daughter — even though Gordimer later found out that her ailment was not life-threatening. Her mother was possessive and stifling, and Gordimer found it difficult to break loose, even as an adult. Her only freedom was found in books — first as a reader and then as a writer. She wanted to write about life in South Africa, but exploring her society meant encountering the repression of black South Africans. Even though she never intended to write political novels, she couldn't seem to avoid it, and that's what she became known for. Three of her novels were banned in South Africa, two of them for more than a decade each. During the 1970s, she was criticized for writing from the point of black characters when she herself was white. She said, "There are things that blacks know about whites that we don't know about ourselves, that we conceal and don't reveal in our relationships — and the other way about." The characters in her books worked against apartheid in a number of ways: driving fugitives across the border, hiding them from the police, and passing secret messages. Over the years, Gordimer revealed that she had done all of those things herself, quietly, and that was what had inspired the stories. But she resisted being enlisted as a spokesperson for the anti-apartheid movement. She was a member of the African National Congress party, but she never paid her dues in person until apartheid ended in the 1990s. With all the changes in South Africa, people assumed that she would have nothing more to write about, but she said, "It wasn't apartheid that made me a writer, and it isn't the end of apartheid that's going to stop me." She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991. Nadine Gordimer died in Johannesburg in July 2014, at the age of 90. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 