Fooled again
September 20, 2007
For the second year in a row Texas has tricked this poor mole into thinking it’s the opposite season. I was happily walking home this afternoon, for the second time in months, and thinking it felt like the last week of college. At my college we generally got one week of beautiful weather at the end of the spring semester to make us feel cheated before we went home. Maybe the town was doing its desperate best to make us miss it.
Seasonal confusion aside, I was thinking about how you can be away from somewhere for years but still viscerally remember it all of a sudden because you just feel the same way you did there. I wonder if it is mostly our senses that are responsible for this, or our moods too. The power of our senses to transport us is well documented, by Proust and his madeleine, for example. I have gone jogging on mornings not too long ago when a rare cocktail of rain and diesel fumes brought me back to the City of the Lion, Belfort.
I’m curious what exactly our mind is matching up when it makes these leaps. Does it look for light, humidity, temperature, and smell? How many of these factors have to fit? Since this has happened to me two years in a row, having springlike feelings when the veritable season is fall, I wonder if the feelings I had were responsible for the correspondence. Like Mole gleefully escaping from his hole into the spring air, or like my collegiate self shedding the manacles of campus, I was feeling a breeze that blew away the oppression of broiling pavement and the prison of air-conditioned automobiles.
It’s good to be back out in the world. Luxury condominiums have sprung up where before there were cheap motel-type apartments. Pits have replaced barren fields (see photo). I missed a lot while I was in the car.
September 27, 2007 at 9:22 am
After turning this over mentally for a while, I’ve decided the most important factor is the light. Of course there are multiple inputs working together. What convinced me was seeing some apple blossoms on the edges of several trees recently, and a red azalea with a few “spring” blooms. And indeed, we’ve just passed the autumnal equinox, where the balance of light is similar to that at the beginning of spring.
September 27, 2007 at 6:17 pm
I like that explanation, perhaps because I am inclined to identify myself with vegetable life forms. Alternatively, a medical expert who reads this blog has proposed smell as the most important factor. If I may quote this person, who e-mailed me directly, “it is evocative and less noticed than sound and sight so it sneaks up on us and surprises us. It may have more direct cortical and memory connections, or maybe sub-cortical since it is less conscious.” Not that this has anything to do with anything, but the word “cortex” comes from the Latin for “bark.”