The late summer garden can be a challenge. The largest plants are reaching maturity–and a gardener’s life sometimes becomes a relentless round of staking things, moving water under the hottest sun of the year, spotting weeds hidden in the luxuriant growth, threatening to go to seed. Sometimes, it feels that trouble is escalating–drought, overgrown beds, unmanaged weeds. Then nights begin to cool, and then the days and things slow down and the garden is glorious beyond description.

Soon enough, frost turns edges of leaves brown. Most things slow or stop growing.  The world continues cooling, there seems relatively little that has to be done, and the chores that remain are not urgent. My relationship to the garden becomes more relaxed, more reflective,  more elegiac.

There are enough remnants of spendor to provide joy–but little can be done or should be done. It’s enough. The end is coming. Wisdom whispers, relax, go with it.

For gardeners, decadence may be experienced as a phase. The rhythm of seasons is integral to gardening. Autumn is followed by winter, which is followed by spring–and yet. Everything is dying. The labor was for naught. What is coming cannot be stopped.

The garden is not decadent, of course. It is merely decaying. But being amid it, one can sense the temptation to decadence–that recurring human response to loss of faith–a way of taking the decay not as a transitory phase but instead as a choice and a meaning. Decadence does not tempt when death is strong and life is only struggle. Instead, it comes while life is vigorous and vivid in its trouble, a sense of choice lingering over everything. The sense of possibility, which is the sense of life, fastens on an abdication of longevity and an endless future. It chooses the now of decay.

Death is as evocative and captivating as birth, as the Romantics knew. When the luxuriant collapse of October, a spectacle of saturated color amid architectures of breakage and bulge, invites us to let go of wearisome hope, rigid desire, loosening and relaxing into satisfactions less thrilled by effort and more darkly edged by the unwinding lassitudes of surrender, when what is left seems all that is left, filling one with an urge to forget the future of endless care. . .

Decadence is an affectation of carelessness more than any profound revelation of anything very true. It seems to permit a giving up on disciplines and sacrifices–the digging and replanting, the weeding, the long vision. Decadents, unlike revolutionaries, do not revolt against the wrongness of society. They are transfixed by a freedom-like aura radiating through their view of wrongness. The release from endless life they hope involves, somehow, a release from goodness, which is care, which is trouble.

In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann describes the character Hans Castorp, a tubercular young man, as “half in love with easeful death.”

In the October garden during perhaps the October of my own life cycle, my mind turns toward young people now awakening to a world which, for them, has always been overgrown in luxuriant decay, which has at many levels surrendered to doom. What do they make of it? Few, it seems to me, give much thought to eternity. They have been taught to follow their bliss and to judge things by the standard of the self and its satisfaction–the small, and transient self.

Much is wrong and what is one to do? Stories end and promises are forgotten. Reform is folly–commanding the tide to stop. Without faith we yield to fatalism, to pessimism, to despair, to yielding. Here. Now. So many things to want falling and fading. Hurry, now, something whispers. Now.

For the gardener, the end time is not a time for reform. None of that will work. It is a time for planning, for preparation, for another spring which will always come.

Mere decay has its beauty and its place. In decadence, though, pessimism and despair become palpable. Young people, new to the story, have to take the cycle somewhat on faith. They see the fading splendor and tend to commit to here and now–to savor passing pleasures which may never come again. Without faith the future is foreshortened. The possibilities of renewal are subverted. Fatalism re-emerges, sapping the will to push back at trouble. What can be done? The end truly does come.

There are, of course, cycles of drought and climate change that are larger than seasons. In human history, there are ages of optimism and movement upward, and ages of decline. Modernity has lived on a moral and intellectual capital that it has not renewed, and we are now within sight of modernity’s end.

What comes next will be better than all that’s gone before. But first, winter.