For Everything There Is a Season

Are the Bulls or the Hawks playing on cable TV tonight? It’s this sort of touchstone that marks the progression of the seasons in the Chicago suburbs, along with discovering that the Halloween end-caps at Wal-Mart have given way to Thanksgiving themes, or deciding a steaming Macchiato at Starbucks sounds better than a frosty Frappuccino. Seasonal change, for many suburbanites, has little to do with nature.

A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture

Michael Kammen (Author)

Brand: The University of North Carolina Press

400 pages

$21.69

As a transplant here six years ago, I went looking for more meaningful ways to be in touch with the four seasons. “More” has come in walks on a 100-acre reconstructed tallgrass prairie, just down the road from the subdivision where I live. It’s planted to represent the original landscape of “The Prairie State,” a state that today seems more comfortable with strip malls and highways than anything to do with tallgrass. Yet, just as Chet Raymo found himself following the change of seasons in Massachusetts on his daily one-mile stroll in The Path, so I find the cycle of the seasons unfolding for me as I walk the prairie trails day after day. Spring into summer is marked by the height of the grasses, the type and variety of the wildflower blooms. Fall submerges me in tallgrass, while loose threads of sandhill cranes arrange and rearrange themselves overhead, moving south. In late winter the prairie is torched, accompanied by the drumming of red-bellied woodpeckers. Emerald shoots rapidly fuzz the charred earth, and the cycle begins again. Each season is enough in itself, yet holds the promise of the next.

Precisely because many of us are out of touch with the rhythms of the natural world, we feel nostalgia for what we have lost. In A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture, Michael Kammen chronicles the evolution of our love affair with the seasons. A professor of American history and culture at Cornell University, Kammen is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization. For two decades, he tells us, he has been a collector of all things four-seasonal, and his passion for the subject is well-nigh irresistible.

Kammen invites us to consider how, when our nation was primarily agricultural and our technology not too far advanced from the Roman era, we stayed in touch with the changing of the seasons, keeping an eye out for harbingers of peril. Today, while we’re still vulnerable to hurricanes and floods and other such reminders of nature’s unpredictable power, we’re insulated against the demands of seasonal change. Air-conditioning mitigates the dog days of August. Snowplows clear roads and expedite travel through all but the harshest blizzards of January. We buy strawberries and oranges in November. The rhythms of the seasons are flattened. Kammen quotes Diane Ackerman: “we’ve worked hard to exile ourselves from nature, yet we end up longing for what we’ve lost: a sense of connectedness.”

The four seasons motif has a rich history. After providing some background on the ancient world’s perceptions of the four seasons, Kammen concentrates on the perception and representation of the seasons in America, from the 17th century to the present. During the first two centuries of European experience here, most seasonal rituals and festivals followed the Christian calendar as they had back in Europe. Marriage, followed by childbirth, was often dictated by the seasons, as clergymen could only reach remote communities in the spring and summer.

Our American ancestors, Kammen says, regarded nature primarily as something to be tamed and controlled—hence the “relative paucity” of seasonal writing between Philip Freneau and Henry David Thoreau, and the relatively “modest” amount of seasonal art prior to the mid-19th century. “Only when agricultural mechanization began to take hold and make a discernible difference during the 1850s and 1860s,” Kammen writes, “did some Americans, especially in the East, begin to feel wistful, nostalgic, or moralistic about the enchanting nature and glories (rather than the challenges) of seasonal change.”

This nostalgia meant money in the bank for those who knew how to package it, especially in the art world, where the four seasons became a commercially viable commodity (think Norman Rockwell calendars). The four seasons motif was used to sell cookbooks, restaurants, hotels, resorts, and anything else that could be ingeniously linked with it.

Indeed, by the 1970s, the seasonal motif “had become so hackneyed in commercial culture that no self-respecting artist could possibly contemplate painting a four seasons’ suite.” But art thrives on unpredictable reversals, and just when this theme had been consigned to the realm of irredeemable kitsch, artists began to find it seductive: “the final quarter of the twentieth century turned out to be an astonishingly fecund time for American art of the four seasons.” (A great bonus of this book is the 48-page insert of beautiful color plates representing artwork from several centuries; in addition, 65 black-and-white photographs and illustrations are scattered through the book.)

It would be misleading to suggest that early Americans were uniformly narrow and utilitarian in their perception of the natural world. The great theologian Jonathan Edwards was also a keen student of nature, savoring its beauty and its intricacy. In the early 19th century, many writers extolled the seasons as evidence of God’s hand, proclaiming the connections in lofty prose. But, Kammen argues, the confidence that underwrote such rhetoric began to fade. Commenting on Amherst College president Edward Hitchcock’s lectures on the four seasons, Kammen observes, “Other naturalists during the second half of the nineteenth century might be Christian believers, but never again would anyone elaborate a seasonal case that ‘by bringing before the imagination the most brilliant objects of the natural world, we get some faint conception of its magnificence; or rather, we learn that the most splendid scenes of earth are only faint emblems of the New Jerusalem and the Glory of God which forms its light.'”

Here Kammen surely overstates his case. In the 20th century, to take only one example among many, C.S. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory: “When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. … We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her; into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.” If Lewis’ words do not explicitly touch on the motif of the four seasons, there is nevertheless an unmistakable affinity between his perception of nature and Edward Hitchcock’s from the century before. Other counterexamples are ready at hand—the poet Luci Shaw, for instance: “All the field’s a hymn! All dandelions give glory, gold and silver.”

Still, there’s some truth to Kammen’s contention that writers who attributed the natural wonders of the seasons to God gave way, beginning in the last half of the 19th century, to others who “replaced religion with careful empirical notations of natural phenomena, often romanticized by touches of pantheism.” Few of the most prominent 20th-century naturalists writing about the seasons were traditional Christians, he notes, and many of their readers replaced religion with “the Gospel of Nature.”

Why did we stop hearing from most traditional Christian writers about nature? To some degree at least, the answer must be connected with the impact of Darwinism. Another factor, perhaps, is the polarizing effect of the environmental movement. Whatever the causes, it is good to see that Christian reflection on nature is enjoying a new flowering—evident, for example, in the work of Wendell Berry.

As befits a volume on the four seasons, this is a feast of a book. Kammen’s encyclopedic range of references to the seasonal motif in every imaginable form sent me down a hundred delightful rabbit trails of further investigation. Still, with so many centuries and so much artistic and literary ground, it’s inevitable that a few of my favorite seasonal writers were neglected. The curmudgeonly Henry Mitchell, whose beloved columns from the Washington Post are organized by month in One Man’s Garden, is notable by his absence. Sigurd Olson, whose The Singing Wilderness—on the Northwoods country—has found a place on almost every nature lover’s bookshelf, doesn’t merit a mention, nor does Paul Gruchow’s lyrical Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild, a four-seasons exploration of this beautiful part of the country. Michael Pollan’s dynamic Second Nature likewise is a no-show. Too recent to fall into Kammen’s net is Skylight Path’s series of seasonal anthologies, edited by Gary Schmidt and Susan Felch, beginning with Winter: A Spiritual Biography of a Season; the Autumn volume has just been released.

“In an unpredictable, disorderly world of flux,” Kammen writes, “the seasonal cycle offers reassurance that at least some fundamentals in this life are eternal.” Eternal? Maybe not. But reassuring nonetheless. And now please excuse me: I have to rake some leaves.

Cindy Crosby writes about nature and the spiritual life in By Willoway Brook: Exploring the Landscape of Prayer (Paraclete). She also writes the Bookmarks review column for Christianity Today.