Summer has a fury that even the coldest winter storm cannot match, a tireless fury of long hot days and rainless months, of the sun and its wake of fire.

Autumn is like a second summer here in southern California, a milder summer, a lesser fury. While the temperature drops, the chaparral burns and warm Santa Ana winds spread the flames across the coastal mesas and foothills. High in the mountains, ferns in the meadows turn yellow, gold, red, and then brown, as the earth releases the heat of summer.

The furies of summer and fall and the wake of fire: bound up, as they are in modernity with chance and necessity in a phantom order, yet imply great moment beyond. While the setting sun reddened the sky over the Pacific this late September evening, a rainbow stretched out in the clouds northeast of Cowles mountain unperturbed by the fury of departing summer. And then came darkness.

There was day and there was night, summer and fall, and there were spectres of fury and ease in the sky.