A selection from James Lasdun’s novel, Seven Lies – deliciously poetic prose:

Another single tree turning – ths one a delicate lemon yellow, a poplar down by the pond. 

Distant, intangible pathos. This other universe, with its own moods and meanings, its own not quite decipherable language for expressing them.

A word I learned recently: ‘catabolic’. Having to do with the breaking down of organic matter. I see myself as a catabolist: my peculiar identification with this season, my gravitation towards autumnal things: forms, sensations, experiences, shaped by their relationship with the extinction towards which they are travelling, rather than the act of creation from which they sprang. The implosive beauty of collapse.