I notice it, I notice it immediately. Something about the quality of the air, you might say. I’m not sure what, but something. Something in the vibration of things, in the specific way of vibration of things.

In the different way of their rest, too.

I’ve been in the park for two minutes and I already know it. I already feel it, I already know it. It’s autumn, it’s already autumn, and it’s the most evident thing. I don’t know what exactly to attach this perception to, but it is certain. It is even more certain than a scientific fact, a mathematical algorithm, a computational procedure.

Autumn is this desire for a tepid retreat, after the summer expansion. It is the timid desire for shelter, which comes back to life. It is a renewed attention to the delicacy of oneself. It’s telling it each other — each other. Or one to the other, again. Cover yourself, don’t get cold, please remember, and it’s just the first step, just the first step, a small fundamental step, to rediscover that warmth of love that heals from the depths, which leaves you on your feet, puts you back on your feet and leaves you in feet.

You can walk, in a structure of love around you.

Yes, you can walk, if you get into a love story. With the soil, the animals, the plants, the air, the people, the stars, with God. No story matters, no story is worth it, if it is not a love story. You’re too old for everything else now, Marco. You can tell yourself, you’re too old for anything that isn’t a love story, for anything that doesn’t reverberate a love story. It was fine before, to look, explore, understand. For the sake of dividing, cataloguing, examining. It was good, before. Now no more, no more, now it’s time to choose, to choose between love or disappointment, love or performance, love or attempted perfection, love, or progressive consumption.

I am happy to place my feet on a planet with this periodic variation of seasons, a planet with this lovely rhythm. I am happy to sense these mysterious, almost arcane signals from nature. It is a language that is not channeled into the discursive proceeding, to which we are so fond, so much so that we think that all information, all evidence, all real reality is susceptible to discursive, argumentative declination. No, it is something that is immensely more direct, primitive. In short, like a smell, a taste. It moves on a fundamental, primordial layer. On this layer it resonates, it comes back into my circulation, it captures me.

The other thing, the colors. Autumn enhances the colours, enhances your own colours. It takes away light, heat, so that your colors, your lights come out. Step back to give yourself space. But the space of you coming back into yourself, not of your exuberant or hesitant projection of summer (the bright and declarative season). That space. That space opens up, and you can walk into it and you can be comfortable, in it.

You can put that shirt on again, testing the texture of the fabric, rediscovering the pleasure of other layers that delicately cover your skin, which adorn it, overshadow it and adorn it, subtly. Discover a part of yourself that no longer lives in the dry and explicit proposition of your mold, of your shape in space, of your body.

In the summer, you remove, you expose. Conversely, in autumn you cover, hide – but not too much. Just take away from the direct and one-dimensional gaze, so poor compared to your heart. And it is once again a subtle game of imagination, of reconstruction behind a reference of glances, of what is there and cannot be seen and rests in the shadow and in the shadow, it retains its own moods and perhaps crosses your mind between instinctive way and a renewed perceptive sweetness.

Autumn is also in the decrease in signal, the darkness that takes up space, arrives earlier. Autumn is the season of poetry, it means lowering the volumes of all remote controls – so that what is in the shadows, almost hidden, can be exalted, can come out, can finally show itself.

Yes, autumn is also sadness, at times, but more than anything it is a wave of delicacy that arrives like a balm, and speaks to you, calls you, tells you to come back, to start coming back again, to make that restart, that return of which you are filled with nostalgia, that return to the specific universe of what is yours, more yours than yourself.

What you just can’t miss.

Imperfectly transalted and adapted from the italian original post.