"Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night"
About this Quote
Borland sneaks a hard truth into a sentence that feels like a porch-light turning on at dusk: wanting summer to last forever isn’t just unrealistic, it’s a category error. Seasons aren’t optional settings; they’re the architecture of change. His line pivots on a clever escalation. It starts with the familiar complaint about summer ending, then swerves to the absurd: “high tide always” and “a full moon every night.” Those images do the heavy lifting. They’re not random nature postcards; they’re cycles people romanticize precisely because they arrive, peak, and recede. Make them constant and they stop being gifts and become noise, even menace. High tide forever is flooding. A full moon every night is glare, not magic.
The subtext is a critique of emotional entitlement: the belief that our favorite phase should be permanent because it flatters us, comforts us, or makes us feel alive. Borland’s tone isn’t scolding so much as wryly corrective, a reminder that desire can be childish when it refuses the terms of reality. He’s also defending scarcity as the engine of meaning. Summer “works” because it ends; its sweetness depends on its limit.
Context matters here. Writing in a 20th-century American nature tradition that prized attentive observation, Borland frames nature as a moral tutor without sermonizing. The sentence is a miniature lesson in accepting loss, resisting nostalgia-as-policy, and understanding that rhythm, not permanence, is what makes anything feel like life.
The subtext is a critique of emotional entitlement: the belief that our favorite phase should be permanent because it flatters us, comforts us, or makes us feel alive. Borland’s tone isn’t scolding so much as wryly corrective, a reminder that desire can be childish when it refuses the terms of reality. He’s also defending scarcity as the engine of meaning. Summer “works” because it ends; its sweetness depends on its limit.
Context matters here. Writing in a 20th-century American nature tradition that prized attentive observation, Borland frames nature as a moral tutor without sermonizing. The sentence is a miniature lesson in accepting loss, resisting nostalgia-as-policy, and understanding that rhythm, not permanence, is what makes anything feel like life.
Quote Details
| Topic | Autumn |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to Hal Borland — see Hal Borland, Wikiquote page (entry contains this quote). Primary-source book/column not confirmed here. |
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