There is a particular vulgarity in the way summer announces itself: not with style, not with cultivated grandeur, but with the crude insistence of a nouveau riche socialite mistaking excess for sophistication. Barely has spring exhaled its final respectable afternoon before that merciless glare begins to spill across the rooftops β a tyrannical radiance of swollen air, fevered stone, and the kind of cheerful hysteria reserved for souls that have never once been touched by exquisite despair. The cities begin to smell of hot asphalt, exhausted perfume, and moral exhaustion; the nights lose all aristocratic composure and hang heavily above the boulevards like the breath of a decadent god moments before collapse.
And while the world chatters deliriously about βsummer feelings,β I await, with something bordering on religious devotion, the first magnificent grey afternoon of autumn. That sacred hour when fog softens the architecture of reality and the light finally abandons its vulgar obsession with exposure. For only autumn understands the supreme aesthetics of decay. Only autumn possesses the manners to let things die beautifully. A dying leaf upon rain-darkened pavement, the silver percussion of rain against cafΓ© windows, the discreet rustle of a heavy coat in the evening cold β there is more luxury in these melancholies than in every sun-drenched fantasy sold to the modern world. Summer begs to be adored. Autumn merely lights another cigarette in the half-dark and knows that true elegance never asks for attention.
