The Impressions of Horror by Season.

Rereading this passage from an old letter, I am moved to seek out examples to illustrate my former impressions.  Horror and season.  Hmm.  Horror too is a sort of lens, and it comes in many subtle variations of shade, but all pervaded by the physiological and psychological range of reactions which, in various proportions, characterize an instance of horror just as the proportions of the features on a man's face.  Here, more revulsion and what we have seen; there, more dread at what we have not; here again, a serene, as if suffocated, beauty; there now, so

I am too tired now, and too anxious at a chapter I must submit on Tuesday, to think further hereon, but I might as well put down now, that further elaboration of season and horror will require closer examination of season as an aesthetic and philosophic category.  Let's see, season alone gives us time of life, circularity of time, patterns of decay and renewal, the power of nature, man's impotence against both time and nature, inevitability, constant change, the subdivision of time, life and afterlife, orientation and disorientation.  Aesthetically, each season has very distinctive offerings, which vary by time and place, but which are generally spelt out below.

But surely not all horror makes conscious reference to season.  In the modern world, in particular, now divorced from the land, our sources of horror are not so seasonal as before.  Season plays a part, but it surely is not "intrinsically attached to season."  More attention on this point in my scarce leisure.
 

Jan., 2010:––
     With a little thought, I've come to think that horror, while omnipresent, is intrinsically attached to season.  How horror manifests itself in any given instance is largely determined by its setting, and the setting in turn changes from season to season. Indeed, I'm sure you would agree that even your own house, while physically the same in Winter as in Summer, does not feel like the same place in both seasons. Different seasons are like different lenses: while we are seeing the same horror, we see and appreciate it as the lens shows it.
     Spring is the season of primitive bestiality, where passions are high and the horror is atavistic. Man is the monster -- our monstrous subconscious makes us so. It's the season of a restless mind pulled forward by an even more restless body. It's the season of impulse and desire.
     The horror in Summer, I think, is the most abstract. You would need to read Machen to get a really good idea of it, but the horror of Summer is the horror of losing touch with reality and finding the splendorous planes of high and rich imagination. On those planes, we can, of course, very easily forget who we are and what we are about. Summer is the season of a calm body and a restless mind. On long walks in the Summer, with the thick foliage, the ample sunlight, the hot nights and the night rains, the thunderstorms -- then, a fortnight later, drought, and the interminable hum of the cicadas.
     The spirit of Fall is abstract as Spring is not. It's the horror of nostalgia, and, by extension, of memory. In Fall, we are confronted with our mortality, and we are forced to look inward to define who we are. Naturally, when we look inward, we should expect to uncover some rather horrifying revelations. And, there is always the perversity that the most morbid season should also be the most colorful, and to many sensibilities the most beautiful.
     Fall is the most used backdrop for horror; Winter is the least. I believe Winter is the season wherein the external horror is greatest: in Winter, the climate is as harsh as it will get. Consider, if you had to walk three miles through a forest and forgot your jacket, you would be killed. The same task could, in Summer, be accomplished wearing nothing at all! Cold gathers and lingers like a poisonous gas, and we wear our heaviest clothes to protect ourselves. This is the cruelest season, and it is fittingly also the starkest. But, in its starkness, there is a degree of intense beauty and matchless purity absent in all the other seasons. Winter is the season of desolation, and so inclined are we to stay inside during it, that it is often left to its own devices. Surely, any one who has gone for a long, lonesome walk on a day of heavy snow can recall the eerie effect the snow has on sound: it is all at once very intimate -- the sounds are very close and soft -- and isolating. Some times, one finds that Winter also has the strongest character. While the other seasons send their emissaries in the forms of animals and sounds and plants, Winter comes as himself, and when he finds you walking alone, he accompanies you as himself.