Seeing and being in the presence of good behavior provides an important ethical tool. Watching someone who does something well is an excellent way to learn. This is true for activities as varied as performing surgery and living responsibly. Every society needs role models and other exemplars of skill and virtue.
Value for Monday of Week 48 in the season of Harvest and Celebration
Cycles – Seasons
Life is cyclical.
- There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity . . . [The Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1.]
- Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something’s time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings. [Henry Cloud]
Our model presents both work and rest as values. We cannot do them both simultaneously, so which is the preferred value? The question assumes a false choice. No one can work all the time, and no one should rest all the time. Each has its time. The same is true for many of the values presented here. This model explores ethics in several planes of analysis, including the following:
- Assertive (for example, courage) and Deferential (humility);
- Developmental (learning) and Restorative (reflection);
- Four relationships: to the self, to others, to society, and to the material world;
- Past, present, and future;
- The domains of Being: thinking, feeling emotionally, and acting;
- Giving and Receiving;
- Worth and Value;
- Expending and Replenishing.
As the body-builder cannot exercise every muscle at once, the soul- and spirit-builder cannot exercise every aspect of Being at once. There are times to focus on learning, times to reflect and times to rest. There are times to focus on the self, times to focus on others who are close to us, times to focus on society at large and times to do our mundane work. There are times to focus on the past and the future, as well as the present. There are times to develop our intellects, times to develop our bodies and times to attend to our emotional well-being.
Because its pattern is cyclical, we see the solar year as a metaphor for our lives. The use of a liturgical year-calendar is not meant as a prescription for practicing particular values on particular days, any more than a body-builder would exercise his triceps only one day each year. The point of the liturgical calendar is to offer each value for consideration in its turn, in an order that best corresponds to the model’s intent. By no stretch of the imagination is this the only way one might learn about these values. In fact, they are best learned through practice.
Real
True Narratives
Seasonally-themed essay collections by Karl Ove Knausgaard:
- Autumn (first of series) (Penguin Press, 2017): “‘Autumn’ is sweet and slender and very circumspect. ‘I want to show you our world as it is now,’ he writes to his daughter. ‘You will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: Showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.’”
- Winter (second of series) (Penguin Press, 2018): “‘Winter,’ the second collection of essays in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘four seasons’ quartet, comprises 60 short pieces, punctuated by three letters addressed to his youngest daughter.”
- Spring (third of series) (Penguin Press, 2018): “. . . a Man Considers How Best to Help His Sick Wife”.
- Summer (fourth of series) (Penguin Press, 2018) “provides a master class in creating reader-writer intimacy.”
Russell King, Atlas of Human Migration (Firely Books, 2007).
Technical and Analytical Readings
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- Great Migrations video
- Winged Migration, a documentary that records the migrations of dozens of bird species
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
A book cycle by Ali Smith:
- Autumn: A Novel (Pantheon Books, 2017): “When the story begins, the year is 2016, and Daniel, now 101, is quietly dying in an elder-care facility somewhere outside London. He has no family, so Elisabeth appoints herself to the position.”
- Winter: A Novel (Pantheon Books, 2018): “ . . . Smith is the one doing the telling, which means the books can’t help connecting through various channels, most notably her vast supply of preoccupations.”
- Spring: A Novel (Pantheon Books, 2019): “This is the most political book thus far in this earthy and humane series. Its heart is worn far out on its sleeve. It beats arrhythmically somewhere down near the knuckles.”
- Summer: A Novel (Pantheon Books, 2020): “In Smith’s hands, stories slipstream in the wake of other stories; dreams are tucked up under the armpits of serious shifts in time and space. There are no directional arrows Scotch-taped to the floor.”
Poetry
The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.
Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.
They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is way in ours.
[Robert Frost, “In Hardwood Groves”]
One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths,
One's tootings at the weddings of the soul
Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds
Occurred above the empty house and the leaves
Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,
As if someone lived there. Such floods of white
Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind
Threw its contorted strength around the sky.
Could you have said the bluejay suddenly
Would swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays
Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths.
The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.
To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine
And pines that are cornets, so it occurs,
And a little island full of geese and stars:
It may be the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spuse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
[Wallace Stevens, “The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man”]
Other poems:
- Robert Frost, “October”
- Robert Frost, “Spring Pools”
- Wallace Stevens, “Phases”
- John Keats, “Ode to Autumn"
- E. Cummings, “when god lets my body be”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Antonio Vivaldi, The Four Seasons (1723) (approx. 38-49’) (list of recorded performances), is a set of four violin concerti from Vivaldi’s twelve Op. 8 concerti, entitled, as translated, “The Contrast Between Harmony and Invention”. Performances are by Biondi, Jansen, Fischer, Brown, Kennedy, Chandler, Podger, Little, Thompson, Edinger, de Swarte, and Fullana, and a version by Pioro preceded by narration. Here is a joyous recording by Andreea Chira on pan flute. Of course, each of the seasons is worth hearing on its own, particularly in these spectacular performances by Fabio Biondi:
Franz Josef Haydn, Die Jahreszeiten (The Seasons), Hob. XXI:3 (1801) (approx. 138-157’) (description and libretto) (list of recorded performances), an oratorio: top recorded performances are conducted by Colin Davis in 1967, Marriner in 1980, Gardiner in 1991, Jacobs in 2004, Herreweghe in 2014, and McCreesh in 2017.
Alexander Glazunov, The Seasons, Op. 67 (1899) (approx. 34-40’) (list of recorded performances), a ballet
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Seasons, Op. 37a, TH 135 (piano) (1876) (approx. 37-47’) and Op. 37b (orchestra) (1876) (approx. 43-51’) [Op. 37 (list of recorded performances)]: “Each piece was given a subtitle and an accompanying verse.”
Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, Les Quatre Saisons (1724) (approx. 74’) (libretto, beginning at p. 56): “Although it is not known to which mysterious figures they were dedicated, Joseph de Boismortier's cantatas Les Quatre Saisons, published in 1724, resonate with the splendour of court festivities and the eloquence of the salons de conversation. The libretto, written by an anonymous but undoubtedly romantic hand, unfolds it's poetry through the seasons, and the composer seems to have enjoyed recreating all it's subtleties in his music.”
Pēteris Vasks, The Seasons (Die Jahreszeiten) (1980-1995) (approx. 52-53’); Cycle (1976) (approx. 16’); and Cuckoo’s Voice (Spring Elegy) (2021) (approx. 12’)
Elena Firsova, Piano Quartet No. 2, “Four Seasons” (2019) (approx. 16’) offers a dour look at the seasons. “The notes say: ‘The four movements are a description of the English seasons starting from a mild Winter, a beautiful Spring, a short Summer and a rather sad Autumn.’”
Dennis Johnson, November (1959) is a groundbreaking minimalist work for solo piano. “November has no metrical beat: its single notes and dense cluster chords hover in a melancholy space. Johnson has said he was trying to capture the slow onset of winter.” R. Andrew Lee (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4) (2013) (293’), Jeroen van Veen (2017) (321’), and Nicolas Horvath (2022) (377’) have recorded the work.
Jon Boden is an English singer and fiddler who has recorded a series of twelve albums, collectively entitled “A Folk Song a Day”. They are “January” (2011) (98’), “February” (2011) (93’), “March” (2011) (96’), “April” (2011) (103’), “May” (2011) (122’), “June” (2011) (103’), “July” (2010) (113’), “August” (2010) (101’), “September” (2010) (83’), “October” (2010) (99’), “November” (2010) (98’), and “December” (2010) (85’).
Other works:
- Alessandro Scarlatti, La Gloria di Primavera (The Glory of Spring) (1716) (approx. 138’): “. . . the (first) performance of La Gloria featured sumptuous sets and costumes by Christoforo Schor and probably one special effect with stage action. Jove would likely have descended from the stage rigging in a cloud machine, literally a deus ex machina.”
- John Harbison, Symphony No. 2 (1987) (approx. 23’): the four movements evoke dawn, daylight, twilight and darkness, respectively.
- Alberto Ginastera, Estancia, Op. 8 (1941) (approx. 33’) (list of recorded performances) and Estancia Suite, Op. 8a (1943) (approx. 13’) (list of recorded performances): this ballet presents the sequence of dawn, morning, afternoon and night. It “tells the adventures and opinions of an archetypal gaucho suffering the hardships and injustice of the times: from a contented life working on a ranch, the unsuspecting hero is press-ganged into the ill-treated frontier militia; he deserts to find his home abandoned and his family lost, becomes an outlaw, and finally escapes across the frontier to try his luck living with the Indians.”
- Gerald Finzi, Before and After Summer, Op. 16 (1932-1949) (approx. 32-33’) (lyrics) (list of recorded performances): “Although this cycle contains seven different characters, it leads to the same conclusion, ‘love’, although it shows a different love in each character.”
- Astor Piazzolla, Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) (1965-1970) (approx. 26’) (see also here); arranged by Mosalini as Cien años. “Unlike Vivaldi’s seemingly coherent set envisaged as an interconnected cycle, the four pieces in Las cuatro estaciones porteñas originated separately between 1965 and 1970 as individual short works—all of them featuring explicit quotations from Vivaldi.”
- Juliana Hall, “Theme in Yellow” (1989) (approx. 10-12’) “is a song cycle about the season of Autumn, beginning with leaving Summer behind, and then experiencing the rustling of the crops before harvest as the winds blow through them.”
- Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, Sielunmaisema (2019) (approx. 35’): the work presents all four seasons but this is not Vivaldi. “Sielunmaisema translated from Finnish means a ‘soul-landscape, a particular place that a person carries deep in the heart and returns to often in memory.’ It can be described as a landscape that ‘hits you in the center of your chest, the one you that immediately feels like home.’”
- Betty Jackson King, Four Seasonal Sketches (1955) (approx. 19’)
- James Oswald, Airs for the Seasons (1755) (approx. 57’)
Albums:
- Dimitri Howald, “Ilja: Spiritual Cycle” (2020) (51’)
- Joey Alexander, “Origin” (2022) (53’) is a journey through the year’s seasons.
- Voces8, “Equinox” (2018) (71’): “Two – or possibly even three – cycles run concurrently here: the sacred cycle of the church calendar, the human cycle from birth to death, and the natural turning of the year from winter to spring.”
- Gjermund Larsen Trio, “Tøyen Sessions” (2023) (39’): “takes you on a journey through both the day and the year with its beginning Morgenslått / Morning Song, via April, Sankthansvals / Midsummer Waltz, to Kveldsvals / Evening Waltz.”
- Sally Anne Morgan, “Second Circle the Horizon” (2025) (38’) “speaks to life’s regenerative nature; its recurring but not identical patterns, intersections and reincarnations . . .”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- The Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (lyrics)
- Elton John, “Circle of Life” (lyrics)
- Franz Schubert (composer), Herbstlied (Autumn Song), D. 502 (1816) (lyrics)
- Amy Beach (composer), “Autumn Song”, Op. 56, No. 1 (1904) (lyrics)
Visual Arts
- Jean Dubuffet, Le Circulus I (1984)
- Jean Dubuffet, Le Circulus II (1984)
- Giuseppe Aricimboldo, Spring from The Four Seasons (1563)
- Giuseppe Aricimboldo, Summer from The Four Seasons (1573)
- Giuseppe Aricimboldo, Autumn from The Four Seasons (1572)
- Giuseppe Aricimboldo, Winter from The Four Seasons (1563)
- Francesco del Cossa, March from The Cycle of Months (c. 1470)
- Francesco del Cossa, April from The Cycle of Months (c. 1470)
Film and Stage
- The Lion King: generations
- Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring: the stages in a man’s life, sorrow, and renewal
