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go to the grave with the song still in them." The first half is a misquote from Thoreau's Walden. It should read,"the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation... There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things." What has been attributed to Thoreau in the second part may be a misquotation of Oliver Wendell Holmes' "From the Voiceless": "alas for those that never sing. But die all their music in them." Confirmed desperation is a term with connotations not unlike the midlife crisis that afflicts so many.

When humans are in "midlife crisis", it is fall. The fruit has matured. Nature's reason for our being is ending. One has spent one's life busily working, amassing, so that instead of owning things, the things own the man. We all go through this, and we think we are alone in it. That is why we are quiet, quietly desperate, not wanting our neighbors to know of our despair. We have spent many a day without a sense of the day passing. We have no time, yet we live in time, minute by minute, hour by hour, the length of which has not changed since our childhood. Thoreau notes in Walden: "things do not change; we change." So although our nature knows better, in the fall of our life we may find ourselves desperate, desperate to "breathe air, drink the drink, taste the fruit." Often one feels that life is passing by like a swift, flowing river, the time slipping away. As he notes, confirmed desperation is called resignation where one gives up, resigned to a fate not of one's choosing .

As the first blasts of winter's cold breath freeze the landscape, so too our movements begin to freeze up, joints stiff with aches and pains as fall turns to winter. As freezing temperatures slow and stop the growth of plants and inhibit movement of animals, we are forced to slow down. In an odd way, it's as if we gradually return to the uncoordinated, immobile dependency that we had as toddlers. Winter is the time when nature returns to its beginnings. Now in winter, snowbound in our cabin, one is given some time back. Time to think and reflect, just as winter gives the plant life and the hibernating animals a "time-out". That wintery cabin-fever time allows for reflection, if one is lucky. Then one may come to realize as Thoreau did, that "the cost of the thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run."

As

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