Gothic Moments

I’ve started to feel it in the air.  Just a tiny bit.  Mostly when I’m outside in the early morning.  While we’re still getting days in the 90’s around here, I sense the slow approach of fall.  A moodiness comes over me that is melancholy and beautiful all at the same time.

Ever since I was a child I’ve felt this.  My breath catches in my throat and a strange, sad rapture fills my chest.  Things look a little darker, more foreboding.  This is not violence, but perhaps the distant threat of it.  It’s subtle, poignant, and absolutely exquisite.

I’ve stood outside and breathed deeply in the autumn and fleetingly thought that should I die at that moment there would be not the least regret.  It’s a little scary, yes, like Halloween, but not like a slasher movie.  This is the atmosphere I try to capture in many of my stories.

Each person is different, I know.  There are those who enjoy the warmth and brightness of summer.  Or the erupting promise of spring.  The cold bleakness of winter is so compelling that I some times have to sit down and remember to breathe.  But autumn.  Autumn.

Even though each person is different, we have only four seasons from which to choose.  There must be others out there who feel about the fall the way I do.  If, perchance, they’re literary types they might enjoy the moody tales I write about a season that never lasts as long as it should, but which would be fatal if it did.

The Gothic movement, so literary critics say, grew out of Romanticism.  Romanticism was a reaction to the cold, mechanical  insistence of the Enlightenment that science could and would explain everything.

People, as cogs in the industrial machine, could be slotted into factories and when worn out, be replaced by the new.  There was no soul to go to Hell, so the hell with it.  We were just robots made of meat.  Automatons.

Romanticism rightly gave the lie to such misguided, but still very powerful thoughts.  We still live in a world where people are interchangeable and science is god.  But when I step outside on a morning when fall is in the air, I know that there’s some kind of heaven out there, even if it is only in the Gothic imagination.