18th century parody on autumn

Now that pale-eyed autumn is once more a sojourner to our shores, treading the joyful grapes of summer into bitter wine, weaving the tapestry of regret with the distaff of memory, and, like a mourning bride, lighting the first tender lamp of melancholy in the hearth of the soul, it behooves we mortals to return to the contemplation of that serene tableau of autumnal ennui which is like the obverse of vernal splendour, and, like it,  precedes and acts as herald of a sterner season, which is even like that season in the life of man unto which all due obeisance must in time be paid. 

What matters, therefore, if in due time we are made poorer and our share somewhat diminished? To what god may we justly attribute such reversals if not to that deity which rules every pantheon with an irreversible will, namely, that first primal god, Chronos, he that wielded the pitiless sickle that with all due circumspection and in full measure, reaped? 

Such too is our measure and our fate, we that are subject to the mild or harsh weathers of the passing moment, and those whims and caprices that, finding their genesis in caterpillar-like sloth, give birth, betimes, to passing beautiful butterflies of fancy bedecked in much splendour, and that, like those short-lived insects, find themselves wind-borne and storm-tossed, given ultimately, but not as seems inappropriate to their origin and destiny, to futility. What but their pithy dance among the flowers is fair, yet but it is short, and in like manner, we mortals enjoy a temporary season, finding only, in such dance and delight, the bitter pollen of experience, culled from so many living flowers of circumstance, whose paraphernalia and appurtenances, giving the appearance of solidity, are like the petals of those selfsame blooms, shaken loose at a moment's notice, and descending once more to a lowly soil.

Even now, brethren, is the leaf descended, and the flitting flies of proud blazoned august given way, to that first chill which bequeaths the equinox with a breath of waiting decline, promising, but still deftly and subtly, the riotous, the dionysian, and the gay, among the sere and withered, the due traits and character of the harvest season, the diabolic Samhain, the ripe apple, the treaded grapes, and the arbor flaming with gold and scarlet, flourishing and blooming with the fire and fullness of the year, a ruddy festival before a long sleep, a banquet accompanied by majestic music, always with a note of melancholy in the finer and nobler chords, played relentlessly, and in that relentlessness, a quickening of the pulse leading only to a faster-coming weariness. 

Autumnus venit; Aestate fugit. 

It's impressed upon me more and more these days that life is the phenomenal side effect of reproduction, and like all side effects and side alleys and detours, fuller of riches than the main way, choked as it is by liars and charlatans, pandering to their biology with selfish moans, until they seem in their ultimate inevitable predictability to give birth to an infinitesimal and tiny orgasm, and, falling back disappointed, still claw at each other like plaster saints, like dying lovers in renaissance pictures, seeking some crumb of consolation from already cooling flesh, flesh that they see, already, crumbling and becoming dust, flesh that they see too readily was a nameless mass, a commonplace abode for an immortal soul, and not worthy of a word or of any effort. They have tricked themselves into love.
How many things are seen for what they are but not named. How often does the heart lie. How unceasingly do we deceive ourselves and invent language games to bypass the hole at the heart of life. We sometimes clearly see, but are always afraid to name, the void at the heart of life, the worm in the apple, the empty space in the middle of pleasure.
At night I'm profoundly emotional, tender, and full of serene regret, wondering at symbolic meanings of empty windows and streetlight. Alcohol opens up a metaphysical void for me, and leaves me strangely determined. It seems to me that I begin to see things in their true light, and how inconsequential they are. A door handle, that, sober, I would placidly turn, now seems like the merest dross, that I must reject, and batter out of my way, mere gross matter, and in every thing, only that, a turning to face sordid matter, concrete, streetlight, window-frames, masonry, all the monuments that man has built to his suffering, all the fucking utilities that he had blindly made to surround his wretched pissing and moaning. I see them in their true light, and cast them from me, painfully conscious of the time I have wasted in acquiring such rubbish.
I want something else, not petty matter, not petty orgasms, but things of the soul, the summit of some tremendous pyramid, made of spirit but clothed in matter, the pinnacle of some triumphant ideal, that one can sometimes achingly find, at last, in the arms, in the hair, in the mouth, on the thighs, between the legs perhaps, of some symbolic woman, standing in, as it were, for the ancient goddess that in the bronze age we all paid obesiance to, standing in for the symbolic muse, becoming the flesh in spirit, the spirit in flesh, and myself, the godhead, the drunk, completing the Trinity and granting myself absolution from the sins of the material world