The Wit’s Guide to Spring

Or, idiotic flowers and nasty birds

Contemplating Hooke’s Law, A.Y. Jackson, 1926

If, in the spring, your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, you must be new around here. You see, last week my readers demanded this issue be about taxes. They are a fun bunch and I love them dearly.

“A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.”
— Emily Dickinson

In rejecting spring, they joined a long line of distinguished individuals who are down on this particular season. We’re about to enter the cruelest month, says T.S. Eliot, an anagram for toilets. April “comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers,” according to Edna St Vincent Millay, an anagram for deviancy installment. “Boring is the spring in Boston with its recalcitrantly green trees and yellow monotonous forsythias in garden plots, complained Vladimir Nabokov, a.k.a Vivian Darkbloom.

“Every year, back Spring comes, with the nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off, and the ground all mucked up with arbutus.”
— Dorothy Parker

Why do all these stupid flowers cause so much spring misery? Of course the Germans have a word for it: Frühjahrsmüdigkeit, or early year tiredness. Nearly 3 in 4 Deutschlanders claim to suffer from this syndrome, which suggests we could cure countless diseases if we just didn’t name them.

“Winter braced me slightly, but Spring has unbraced me completely.”
— Samuel Marchbanks

Legend has it that when Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1913, audiences philliped out. Vegetables and fists were thrown, class warfare broke out, arrests were made, and modernism was born — maybe. Later investigations conclusively proved not much, other than that someone might have hissed. But the fact remains: Some people hate spring!

“If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labor-saving Utopia?”
— George Orwell

Perhaps irrational hatred of the season of rebirth is just the mirror image of unwarranted affection for the season of decay. As The Wit’s Guide To Fall reported, the excitement for pumpkin spice results in a considerable backlash. Isn’t the Creme Egg McFlurry worthy of equal spite? (Interestingly, The Wit’s Guides to Summer and Winter were much less divisive.)

“In the suburbs of Delaware, spring meant not young love and damp flowers but an ugly divorce from winter and a second marriage to buxom summer.”
— Andrew Sean Greer

As usual, Kurt Vonnegut knows what’s up. He had a theory that all our complaining about the seasons comes down to the fact that, in North America at least, we’ve miscounted them from the get go. There are actually six in total: The four we know plus Locking, in November and December when everything shuts down, and Unlocking, in March and April when it all starts up again.

“The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time,” he said in a 1978 commencement speech at Fredonia College in western New York. “I mean, Spring doesn’t feel like Spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for Fall and so on.” 

“Spring makes everything look filthy.”
— Katherine Whitehorn

So throw open the window, take a deep breath, and harrumph at this miserable time of unlocking. But keep hope alive and tally up your capital expenses, because next week, it’s tax time!

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Every week, a ReccoMention 

For my paying subscribers (C$30/yr!) this week, a masterwork of cheerful pessimism, if not the best feeling to cultivate then at least the most realistic:

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Every month, a Riposte Card 

For my founding subscribers ($C80/yr!) who don’t hate this season (and also the ones who do), you’ve already received Laurna Germscheid’s morbid celebration of spring — but it’s not too late to have a stack of these elegant artworks shipped directly to your mailbox!

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Quote Vote

“Spring is here — and I could be very happy, except that I am broke.”
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

As threatened, you’ll be reassessed next week:

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Issue No. 247 of Get Wit Quick is looking out the window at sunshine and a high of 8C today (47F and a whopping 281K) and feeling pretty good about that, even if the birds could work on their harmonics. I don’t always ignore the results of voting, but every once in a while it helps reaffirm your commitment to democracy, right? Too soon? Don’t spring clean my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting off your shelf. And lightly turn your fancy to the ❤️ below.