Turn, Turn, Turn

One of my favorite folk-rock songs is "Turn, Turn, Turn."

To every thing, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together
To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven
A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing
To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven
A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time for peace, I swear it's not too late

words adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes by Pete Seeger
music by Pete Seeger

Michael Kammen is in season. He has read all of the right stuff. If this is (fair & balanced)nostalgia, so be it.

[x CHE]
Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring in American Culture
By MICHAEL KAMMEN

Some 25 years ago I began to be intrigued by depictions of the four seasons. They just kept surfacing hither and yon, in museums and public spaces -- all four seasons in suites, not just single pictures with titles like "Summer Haying" or "Winter Landscape." Gradually, my awareness expanded to sculpture, architectural ornaments, and the decorative arts -- works encountered in venues from galleries in Fort Worth, to venerable hotels de ville in Paris, to seasonal pavilions surrounding elegant ponds in Suzhou, China. Once I was alert to it, the motif seemed to be ubiquitous, so I took notes on my serendipitous discoveries and filed them away.

In the late 1990s, an avocational whimsy became a compulsion. Using the computerized inventory of the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art and the ingenious search engine ArchivesUSA, I was able to pursue my interest more systematically, tracking down sources that had previously seemed inaccessible. That also led me to a considerable literature devoted to the subject, ranging from fiction and poetry to almanacs and, most notably, the writing of naturalists, as well as to music evoking the changing seasons -- far more than just Vivaldi's famous suite of concerti (1726) and Haydn's great oratorio The Seasons (1801), but also works like Verdi's ballet suite "Les Quatre Saisons" (1851) and Joni Mitchell's folk song "The Circle Game" (1970).

When I finally decided to write a book devoted to the history of this motif, I faced an array of problems and issues unlike any I had encountered in previous projects. Because the seasonal motif dates back to antiquity and can be found in the literature and art of most cultures in the temperate zone around the world, I first had to figure out what balance to strike between concentrating upon an American story and taking into account its provenance and parallels elsewhere.

I did not want merely to compile an international encyclopedia of seasonal sequences. Equally important, I needed to see what methodological precedents existed in my own disciplines of history and American studies. Had anyone traced the trajectory of a major motif over time? Did models exist that could offer guidance on traps to avoid as well as paths to follow? What about the history of notions that have profoundly mattered to many Americans -- ones indicative of the values we have held most dear? Those questions led me to revisit an imposing group of benchmark books.

Most obvious were works that traced the history of an important concept: Perry Miller's two-volume classic The New England Mind (1939 and 1953), Albert K. Weinberg's Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (1935), and Arthur A. Ekirch Jr.'s The Idea of Progress in America, 1815-1860 (1944). Consulting such text-based works in intellectual history reminded me that I was working on a visual motif, not just an elusive idea. Miller's "model" was especially striking, however, because in the first of his volumes he offered a topical and synchronic view of Calvinist beliefs in late 16th- and 17th-century England and her colonies, whereas the second volume provided a diachronic, developmental account of how and why Calvinism got transformed by the exigencies of New World conditions. I would need to do something similar, since the American version of the four-seasons motif originated in the Old World but gradually underwent notable alterations here.

Several other classic works that influenced me are routinely identified as progenitors of the "myth and symbol" school of American studies: Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964). The limitations of their approach began to be widely discussed by the 1970s, for example putting more stress upon the significance of certain texts to us rather than on what the original authors wished to say. Still, an emphasis common to both books remains important, especially for my purposes: namely, their insistent attention to contradictions in American culture. As Marx observed of the pastoral ideal, "It enabled the nation to continue defining its purpose as the pursuit of rural happiness while devoting itself to productivity, wealth, and power."

Since the late 20th century, a new genre of works has gone further in exploring the relationship between visual and literary "texts," and I revisited Sarah Burns's Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (1989), which extended several of Marx's major insights into the realm of paintings. As Burns observed, "The image of the good farm in the 19th century was the offspring of the marriage of European pastoral traditions with Thomas Jefferson's agrarian politics." That kind of convergence supplied a sensible reminder about cultural fusion. Also pertinent, Merrill Schleier's The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890-1931 (1986) highlighted the critical response to a new and native structural form, but with special reference to the tension between tradition and innovation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Three other interpretive inquiries added more clues to the puzzle I was beginning to piece together. Reading Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind (first published in 1967, with two revised editions since then) enhanced anew my appreciation for aspects of the American "Gospel of Nature," the title of a widely noted essay by the naturalist John Burroughs, prominent among my emerging dramatis personae. Burroughs's impassioned love of nature and its inspirational gifts offered solace to many Americans at a time when so many were wracked by doubt, during what has been dubbed the spiritual crisis of the gilded age.

Quentin Anderson's The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (1971) highlighted the American flight from society into the "empire of the self." In the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, a heightened sense of self in relation to the natural world became a prominent trope. Finally, The Moving American (1973), George W. Pierson's investigation of mobility, provided a reminder of seasonal variability across the vast diversity of the United States. The obvious but critical fact that the seasons are not experienced in the same way in Maine, Missouri, Texas, and California would have to be emphasized in my study.

The four-seasons motif arrived in America in the 17th century. Before industrialization, it remained largely derivative from European perceptions and rarely innovative. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, for example, were spellbound by "The Seasons," written by the 18th-century Scottish poet James Thomson. Often considered the first book-length poem in English to feature nature, "The Seasons" saw in nature God's plan, helping to reconcile the existence of good and evil.

With the onset of industrialization and urbanization during the 19th century, as fewer Americans lived close to the land, what might be called a "flattening" of the seasons occurred. Seasonal change ceased to affect human lives to the same degree that it once did. The advent of canned foods at the turn of the 20th century transformed the American diet and liberated people from longstanding seasonal constraints. During the 1920s, the Caterpillar company advertised that, with its new snow-removal equipment, "January can be just like July" -- at least in terms of driving automobiles, and especially in American cities. I discovered, nonetheless, that engagement with the four-seasons motif did not diminish. Instead, its appearance in art, music, poetry, and other forms of literature, including the writings of naturalists, actually increased during the 20th century. I have tried to provide a window on the reasons why.

In the 19th century, national chauvinism mattered a great deal: Americans earnestly believed that the seasons and seasonal change were more spectacular in their country than anywhere else. The leading cultural journal at mid-century, The Crayon, quoted a representative response to Jasper F. Cropsey's dramatic painting, "Autumn on the Hudson": "They who know the aspect of Nature in the autumn in England only, have no notion of the glorious garb she elsewhere puts on at that time. In America, the woods are all ablaze." On the eve of the worst sectional struggle in American history, it was not surprising that national chauvinism enjoyed a great surge.

In an echo of the contradictory impulses that Smith and Marx had noted, nostalgia, and a sense of American loss, also mattered, because so many people felt increasingly out of touch with the natural world and with the lifestyle of preceding generations. Ambivalence about modernity played an important part in the attraction to seasonal invocations. Consider the pictorial splendors of Victorians like Cropsey (who created at least a dozen sets of seasonal images, more than any other American painter) and the beloved lithographs of Currier and Ives. The earliest of Currier's images in 1855 did not emphasize seasonal distinctiveness in the United States to an unusual degree, but, within a dozen years, new ones that highlighted romanticized scenes of rustic work and play did.

Consider, too, the seasonal essays of such Brahmins as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and James Russell Lowell, as well as the enormous popularity of books and essays by Burroughs and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. When Holmes lamented, in his 1868 essay on "The Seasons," that too few people paid adequate attention to seasonal change, he was primarily addressing urban dwellers like himself.

The advent of cultural modernism in America early in the 20th century offered fresh challenges and new ways to think about the seasons in metaphorical and allegorical terms. Whereas creative people had previously been most intrigued by the presentation of seasonal peaks, increasing attention came to be devoted to seasonal transitions. Allusions to change became a prominent metaphor. The pace of life seemed to accelerate as the 20th century progressed, and so did the production of books, essays, and art of every type depicting the seasons, quite often as a metaphor for the human life cycle. As in earlier periods, the changes were manifest in high as well as mass culture: in Charles Burchfield's vivid watercolors and the seasonal calendars of Norman Rockwell, in the challenging but moving poetry of Wallace Stevens and W.D. Snodgrass, in the nature writings of Hal Borland, Edwin Way Teale, and Joseph Wood Krutch.

When Jasper Johns completed his famous suite "The Seasons" in 1987, he allowed his dealer, Leo Castelli, to sell three of them. He retained "Autumn" for his personal collection, however, because he felt he had been in the autumn of his life when he created the series. In 1964 the magic realist Peter Blume began his seasonal suite, and in 1972 when Marc Chagall was persuaded to accept a commission to make a monumental mosaic block as public art for downtown Chicago, he selected the four seasons because of the universal appeal of the theme.

By the close of the 20th century, new developments in the biological sciences began to provide information about the impact of seasonal change on human physiology. Women are more notably susceptible than men to Seasonal Affective Disorder during the dark months from November until March, and schoolboys are thought to be more likely to do well on standardized tests in the spring than in the fall because of seasonal variations in their testosterone level. Those findings have practical implications for understanding gendered differences in the human condition and the ways in which those alterations vary during the course of the annual cycle. Seasonal art by women artists like Anne Abrons, Jennifer Bartlett, and Lisa Zwerling is fairly explicit about the link between sex and seasonality.

Thoreau, who loved both seasonal peaks and transitions, organized his great classic, Walden (1854), according to the cycle of the seasons, beginning with spring, when he built his cabin, and then moving on to the sociability that came with curious visitors in summer, the growing isolation of fall, which also provided him with occasions for ecstasy about the stunning beauty of North American foliage, and the quiet of winter, when he could enjoy solitude for productive writing as well as long walks. Eventually, Walden came full cycle with the renewal of life at the advent of spring.

Thoreau's justly revered Journals, published in their entirety just a century ago, are jampacked with seasonal observations, including an entry on June 11, 1851: "No one, to my knowledge, has observed the minute differences in the seasons." A book that did so, he wrote, would be "a Book of the seasons, each page of which should be written in its own season & out-of-doors, or in its own locality wherever it may be." That is just what I have tried to do, except for Thoreau's admonition to write out-of-doors. My work required electrical outlets as well as aesthetic ones.

Michael Kammen is a professor of American history and culture at Cornell University. His most recent book is A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture, to be published this month by the University of North Carolina Press.

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education