SPRING BREAK, HERE WE COME

By Pico Iyer

WHEN SPRING COMES TO THE CITIES OF JAPAN, salarymen dutifully assemble under cherry blossoms, and drunkenly bawl songs in what is really only a quainter version of St. Patrick's Day. In the fall, supermarkets hang paper leaves from their cash registers, and cigarette makers issue packages featuring autumn colors. To a jaded foreigner such an observation can seem as formulaic and debased as the Muzaked versions of Jingle Bells that torment every department store from Bangor to Bangkok.

And yet the very qualities we admire in Japan--its safety and solidarity and sense of long-term planning--are in some ways the result of such promptings as the leaves. For seasons release us from time and space, and usher us into an order higher than ourselves, or nation, or ideology; not so much a collective religion, perhaps, as a religion of collectivism. And seasons rescue us from private winters and admit us to a larger rhythm as unanswerable as the dawn.

The seasons, in fact, teach us two lessons that both steady and chastise: all things must pass, and all things shall return. They tell us that every new beginning brings us closer to an end, and every elegy has within it the echo (and the promise) of a future celebration. They say that love that seems eternal now may soon be a distant memory; and that a new love may come along to revive our sense of eternity. They teach us that suffering is inevitable, and in that inevitability is a constancy that helps take the edge off suffering. We cherish flowers more than evergreens, precisely because they do not last.

Seasons instruct us, then, in a subtler way of being; they initiate us into a process more universal than the new year (which is, after all, celebrated at one time in Chinatown and another time in midtown), and more flexible than moons. All of us have our own calendars (April 15 means taxes, and next Thursday is Cindy's birthday), and all of us think in terms of spring cleaning or fall fashions. But seasons induct us into a world of divisions that are never hard and fast (soft and slow, rather); they offer lessons about constancy and flux (The Winter's Tale is an affirmation of spring), and show us that there are some things--for all our fears of global warning and a nuclear winter--we cannot much affect. Seasons teach us about transitions, for winter elides into spring as gently as remorse into regret, or adolescence into youth. And just when we assume that winter is gone, an unseasonable blizzard will come down to remind us we were wrong.

Seasons are important, of course, because they take place in all of us, and all our days and loves (even if Paris in the spring is Perth in the fall). They are as close to us as the spring in our step or the dying fall in a lover's lament; and the high incidence of alcoholism and suicide in far northern countries is routinely ascribed to the extreme rhythms of three months of white nights giving way to three months of absolute dark. That seasons affect our sense of order is reflected in the fact that doctors speak of seasonal affective disorder. And though the pattern of the skies is still felt on the pulse and in the bones of every farmer and nomad, those of us immured in 14-story office blocks, under fluorescent lighting, need Easter eggs to remind us of the day: if we can't go back to nature, we have to let nature come back to us.

In America we hymn a gospel of progress, and the great premise, and promise, of the country is its continual forward motion. One reason so many people migrate to the New World is to escape the hidebound traditions and confining circles of the Old, to flee changeless cycles for a world of never-ending blue. America revels in a child's sense that the future is illimitable, and tomorrow need not bring with it any taint of yesterday.

Yet a land that is entirely linear is itself limited, and the sorrow of a place like California, it often seems, is that no one there knows who he will be (or who he will be with) a year from now. The absence of external rhythms forces everyone to try to make his own. And a world without seasons is as unnatural as a person without moods: even tropical islands speak of wet seasons and dry; and even places with climatic changes often add divisions of their own (thus the English ruling class follows the season from Henley to Ascot to Wimbledon). Everyone needs some stability in his life, whether it be from a partner, a routine or a home; and that is what the seasons are to us--our loves, our habits and our living rooms.

So even as we jeer at the paper cherry blossoms fluttering off Kyoto lampposts, we may also envy the sense of continuity and history and community they enforce; and marvel at how a society can function like an orchestra, each person playing his part while attending to a common score. A country with a sense of seasons has greater respect for the old, and a clearer sense of tomorrow. That is why newspapers in Japan that meticulously chart the dates on which the leaves will fall may be precious in not just the derogatory sense. And why a Japanese would understand why this most autumnal of meditations is being published at the very time when most of us--in the north, at least--are exulting in the first days of spring.