Nature Speaks

On John Everett Millais’s Autumn Leaves, the mystery of remembered time, and the ordinary moments whose meanings we have yet to discover.

There is something about John Everett Millais’s Autumn Leaves that becomes increasingly difficult to explain the longer I look at it, as though beneath the apparent simplicity of four girls gathering fallen leaves on an autumn evening lies something we recognise without quite knowing what it is we have recognised. The light is fading, the trees have darkened against the last pale colours of the sky, and the children stand around a great heap of leaves, two holding armfuls against their dresses while another bends towards the pile and the youngest, standing slightly apart, holds an apple in her hands. Nothing remarkable appears to be happening, yet there is an extraordinary stillness about the scene, a feeling that the ordinary movement of life has been interrupted for a moment, allowing us to look upon something that would otherwise have passed unnoticed. I find myself studying the girls’ faces, wondering whether they are tired, whether they are thinking about going home, or whether the melancholy I seem to recognise in their expressions belongs entirely to me, brought to the painting by a mind that knows something about the passing of time which the children themselves, still living within their autumn afternoon, could not possibly know.

And then, towards the left of the painting, I notice the smoke, rising so faintly from the heap of leaves that it almost disappears into the gathering dusk, and with this small discovery the scene changes, for the children are not simply collecting what has fallen from the trees but gathering it to be burnt. There is something strangely affecting about the almost invisible movement of that smoke, the way it rises from the leaves while losing the very form by which we might follow it, becoming indistinguishable from the evening air, as though the painting has allowed us to witness the precise boundary between something being present and its passing beyond our sight. Millais has preserved that fleeting movement so completely that it can never finish, the smoke suspended forever above the leaves, the children held within an evening that will never quite become night, and I find myself wondering about this curious power of painting, which can arrest a moment that would otherwise have vanished while leaving us more conscious than ever of everything that cannot be held. For the girls have long since lived their lives, the voices that once accompanied their work have fallen silent, and whatever awaited them when they eventually went indoors belongs to a world that has disappeared, while the small plume of smoke continues to rise before us, unchanged after more than a century and a half.

Looking at the leaves gathered around their feet, I find myself remembering my mother’s garden, where an enormous oak shed such quantities every autumn that clearing them became a task I sometimes thought would never end. My mother liked everything kept tidy, and her garden was no exception, although the oak appeared determined to resist her expectations, scattering leaves across the lawn, filling the borders and covering the paths almost as quickly as I could clear them. My brother once remarked that she kept the garden as tidy as the house, an observation that still makes me smile because it captured something of her character so perfectly, her pleasure in order, her determination to look after the things around her, and perhaps a certain refusal to accept that the natural world might have arrangements of its own. I remember the weight of the damp leaves, the repeated journeys to dispose of them, the irritation of discovering that another gust of wind had undone much of my work, and the feeling that there were infinitely more interesting ways in which I might have spent an afternoon. I cannot pretend that I found the task particularly enjoyable, nor that I was secretly appreciating the beauty of the season while struggling to keep pace with the oak, yet these are the very afternoons that have returned to me through Millais’s painting, with an unexpected tenderness that seems to belong to another understanding of my life.

My mother and brother both died three years ago, and although the memories of the garden belong to an earlier time, their absence has altered the way I experience them, so that something which once seemed no more than a familiar responsibility has become inseparable from the presence of two people I can no longer speak to. I find this difficult to explain, because the memory itself has not changed in any obvious way; I still remember the work as tiring, still recognise my mother’s determination to keep everything immaculate, still smile at my brother’s remark, and yet these ordinary details now seem to contain an entire world that I could not have recognised while I was living within it. Perhaps this is one of the more mysterious qualities of memory, that an experience does not remain entirely as we leave it, but continues to acquire significance through events that have not yet happened, so that the meaning of an afternoon may be transformed by something occurring many years after the afternoon itself has ended. I wonder whether the tenderness I feel towards those hours was somehow present all along, concealed beneath my impatience, or whether it has come into existence through the losses that have made me look back, and whether there are moments in our lives whose deepest meanings cannot yet be known because the experiences that will eventually illuminate them are still waiting somewhere in our future.

We tend to imagine the past as a place we have already visited, its events completed and their meanings more or less established, while the future remains open and uncertain, yet I wonder whether the boundary between them is quite as simple as this suggests. The events of our lives may be irreversible, but the ways in which we understand them are continually shaped by the people we become, by the things we learn and by the unexpected connections that arise between experiences separated by many years. An afternoon that once seemed unremarkable may eventually become one of our most vivid memories, while an occasion we carefully preserved in photographs may gradually lose much of its emotional significance, and perhaps what we call our past is not simply a collection of things that have happened to us but a living relationship with those experiences, one that continues to develop for as long as we ourselves are changing. I find something both beautiful and unsettling in this thought, because it suggests that we move through our ordinary days surrounded by meanings that remain inaccessible to us, not through any failure of attention or appreciation, but because some forms of understanding require the passage of time itself. We cannot know what an experience will eventually become to us while we are still entirely within it, any more than the girls in Millais’s painting can look upon their own afternoon from the distance through which we now regard them.

And I think there is something important in resisting the temptation to turn this recognition into another instruction about how we ought to live, for we are so often reminded to cherish every moment, to appreciate the people we love while they are here, and to remember that the ordinary days we take for granted may one day become the ones we most long to revisit. There is truth in such advice, but I sometimes wonder whether it asks something impossible of us, as though we ought to move through our lives with a continual awareness of everything we stand to lose, recognising the future absence of the people beside us even while they are speaking, or feeling grateful for every tiresome responsibility because it belongs to a world that will not last forever. How could we live freely beneath the weight of such knowledge, or become absorbed in the simple pleasures and frustrations of an ordinary day if every experience were accompanied by the thought of its eventual disappearance? I would not wish to return to my mother’s garden carrying the understanding I possess now, forever conscious that I was living through a diminishing number of afternoons in which my mother and brother would still be alive, because I suspect such knowledge would have made the work almost unbearably sad. There was something valuable in being able to complain about the leaves, to smile at my brother’s observation and to carry on without imagining that one day I would remember those moments with such affection, and perhaps we need to allow our earlier selves the innocence of not knowing what was to come, recognising that the ordinary business of living requires a degree of trust in tomorrow, however uncertain that trust may ultimately prove to be.

I think, too, of the peculiar ways in which another person’s presence becomes woven into our lives, often through habits and expectations so familiar that we scarcely recognise them as expressions of a relationship. We know how someone likes their tea, where they prefer to sit, which small disorder will trouble them, what they are likely to say when something goes wrong, and gradually these details become part of the invisible structure of our days, shaping our movements and decisions without requiring much conscious thought. When that person is gone, the structure changes, although the physical world may remain almost entirely the same, and we can find ourselves unexpectedly affected by a task we no longer have to perform, a preference we no longer need to remember, or a familiar remark that no one else would make in quite the same way. I wonder sometimes what my mother would remember of those afternoons in the garden, whether she would recall the leaves at all or whether her memories would be filled with the pleasure of seeing everything tidy, the flowers she had planted or some other detail that has disappeared entirely from my recollection. And what would my brother remember? Perhaps he forgot his remark almost as soon as he made it, never imagining that I would still be smiling at it three years after his death, and there is something lonely in realising that the people who once shared our ordinary experiences carried their own versions of them, versions we can no longer ask them to reveal. We lose not only their presence but the possibility of seeing our shared lives through their eyes, and a memory that once belonged to several people becomes something we must learn to carry alone.

Perhaps this is why I find myself looking again at the faces of Millais’s girls, wondering what they might have remembered of that evening had they lived long enough to recall it from the distance of old age. Would they have remembered the smoke, the smell of burning leaves, the cold gathering around them as the light faded, or would something entirely different have remained, the taste of an apple, a conversation among the others, the anticipation of returning to a warm room? It is possible that the occasion disappeared almost immediately from their memories, absorbed into countless other autumn evenings, and that what has become so affecting to us was no more than a task to be completed before they could return to whatever occupied their lives beyond the painting. We cannot know, and I am increasingly drawn to the importance of that uncertainty, for the children are not merely symbols of transience, nor does their presence exist to illustrate our thoughts about mortality. They were individuals, inhabiting a world as immediate and complicated to them as ours is to us, with private concerns, relationships and hopes that extended far beyond the moment Millais chose to preserve. I find it moving that we can look so closely at their faces and yet know so little about the lives behind them, just as we may live beside people for years without ever discovering all the memories, fears and associations through which they experience the world.

There is a particular intimacy in the ordinary, I think, which becomes apparent only when we consider how much of our life with others consists of things that would never seem important enough to record. We remember birthdays, holidays and significant occasions, preserving photographs and keeping objects that remind us of the experiences we believe will matter, while the greater part of our shared existence unfolds through making meals, carrying shopping, attending to the garden, repeating familiar conversations and accommodating the small preferences of people whose presence we have come to take for granted. Not all these things are enjoyable, and I would hesitate to suggest that every burden should be understood as an expression of love, for there are responsibilities that exhaust us and expectations that can demand too much, yet I wonder whether something of the particular texture of a relationship resides in these unremarkable acts, not because they are inherently meaningful, but because they arise from living alongside someone whose habits and needs have become intertwined with our own. My mother wanted the garden tidy, I grew tired of clearing the leaves, and my brother made a remark that amused me; none of these details was especially profound, and I would not want to make them more harmonious or sentimental than they actually were, because their very ordinariness is what allows me to recognise the people I knew. My mother would not be quite herself in my memory without her determination to keep everything in order, any more than my brother would be quite himself without the familiar humour that could illuminate the smallest domestic situation.

I return to the smoke, and find myself wondering whether what moves me most is not simply the thought of things disappearing, but the knowledge that we can never entirely foresee what will remain. The leaves gathered beneath the children will be consumed by the fire, their individual forms lost to the evening, yet Millais has preserved their disappearance so that people who were not yet born when the painting was made can stand before them and recognise something of their own lives. My brother’s remark, made without any apparent intention of being remembered, has endured more vividly than many conversations in which we discussed matters of far greater importance, while the work I was so often relieved to finish has become an unexpected doorway into a world I can no longer enter. There is something wonderfully mysterious about the way a human life leaves traces in the lives of others, often through moments that appear to possess no particular significance while they are happening, and perhaps this is why the idea of being remembered only through our achievements has always seemed inadequate to me. We are not known to one another solely through the remarkable things we do, but through the familiar presence that gradually becomes part of someone else’s experience of being alive, and it may be a gesture, a preference, a small kindness or even a mildly irritating habit that returns most vividly when we are gone.

I wonder whether this is also something art allows us to recognise, for a painting does not simply preserve the appearance of a moment but creates the possibility of encounters whose meanings could never have been anticipated by the artist or the people he painted. Millais could not have known that his four girls gathering leaves would one day cause me to remember my mother and brother, just as I could not have imagined, while clearing the garden, that a painting made almost two centuries earlier would eventually lead me back to those afternoons with an entirely different understanding of what they contained. The two experiences belong to different lives and different centuries, yet through the act of looking they have become connected, and I find myself wondering how many other such connections remain possible within the familiar world, waiting not for us to acquire more information, but for some unexpected encounter to change the direction of our attention. Perhaps this is one reason we return to works of art at different stages of our lives and discover things we could not previously have seen, not necessarily because the painting has surrendered another secret, but because we have arrived before it carrying experiences that have altered what we are capable of recognising. The picture remains unchanged, while the person looking at it has become someone else.

And now, when I return to Autumn Leaves, I find myself less concerned with what the children may be thinking than with the simple fact that they are still living through their afternoon, their ordinary futures extending beyond the boundaries of the canvas, while we look upon them from a time in which those futures have already become the past. The youngest continues to hold her apple, the older girls remain beside the leaves, and the smoke rises into an evening that will never quite end, while I imagine the moment beyond the painting when they eventually put down their work and go home, perhaps tired, perhaps hungry, perhaps thinking of nothing more significant than the warmth of the room awaiting them. There will be familiar voices, small disagreements, things to look forward to and others they would prefer to avoid, and nothing about the ordinary business of their lives will require them to understand what this particular evening may one day mean. Perhaps that is the thought I find myself returning to most often, that we are always living among experiences whose meanings remain unfinished, and that there may be a kind of tenderness in allowing them to be so, without demanding that every moment become precious simply because it will not last.

For years, I wished there were fewer leaves to clear from my mother’s garden, and I cannot say that I miss the work itself, although I would give a great deal to hear my brother make that remark again, or to see my mother looking out upon the lawn, satisfied that everything was finally tidy, even if the next gust of wind was already bringing down another scattering of leaves. I cannot return to those afternoons, nor would I wish to burden the person I was then with everything I know now, but sometimes a painting allows me to approach that earlier world without trying to change it, to recognise the ordinary irritations alongside the affection, and to remember the people who gave those moments their particular character.

And I think, looking once more at the faint smoke rising through Millais’s autumn evening, that somewhere in the ordinary hours of this very day there may be something whose meaning I cannot yet know, something I will remember quite differently when the years have passed, or perhaps something so small that I will not even notice it until it has become part of a world I can no longer enter.

For the moment, it is simply life, continuing around us, as it always has.

Artwork

John Everett Millais (1829–1896), Autumn Leaves, 1856. Oil on canvas. Manchester Art Gallery, UK.