Last Monday night in London, I left the Royal Albert Hall at 9pm with the sound of Bruckner's cathartic conclusion to his Fourth Symphony (as played by that most Vorsprung durch Technik of orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic) still reverberating in my head.
As my friend and I walked outside we suddenly found ourselves faced with a curious sight: total darkness in mid-evening. Only a few weeks earlier, I'd bumped into the same friend (a fellow classical-music junkie) at one of the first Proms of the season and we then exited the hall into the malt-whisky glow of a half-nine sunset. But now . . . well, as my friend put it very simply: "It's starting, isn't it?"
Two days later, I found myself waking up my 11-year-old daughter at the unreasonable hour of 6.15am, so we could be in our car and out the door by ten minutes to seven. The logic behind the super-precise moment of our departure was a simple one: school was back in session. And according to the unspoken intricacies of automotive herd behaviour as practised in London, if you join everyone else who leaves their homes for the school run precisely at seven (why they do this en masse continues to baffle me), you end up in one of those massive coagulations that are such an enervating facet of life in this city. Whereas if you push off 10 minutes earlier . . .
On that first morning of the new school year, we made it from our house to Amelia's school in just over 20 minutes - which, considering that the school is only four kilometres from us, is still ridiculous. And on my way back home I passed by a two-and-a-half kilometre tailback. And I couldn't help but think: yes, it is starting again.
The French have an expression for this time of year - la rentrée - denoting that moment in September when the lower-keyed rhythms of summer are suddenly brushed aside and we all return to that state of high-level activity known as Business As Usual.
In the French publishing world la rentrée is the moment when more than 2,000 books hit the shops in an eight-week period and everyone is scrambling for editorial space; when the distributors come out with all their prestige films, when there is a heightened sense of many people and things vying for your attention. It's the same scenario in London, in Berlin (where the Philharmoniker and the opera houses are back in full swing), in New York . . . in fact, in any major or minor city where time is money and the ever-encroaching darkness reminds us all that we have now begun the final quarter of yet another year . . . Christmas next stop and all that . . . and the rueful knowledge that calendrical time is an ever-quickening commodity.
When you're a child you hate Septembers - because the summertime liberation from the sheer awfulness of school (does anyone truly have a good memory of their schooldays?) is whisked away from you and you are back in the realm of bullies and brats and cantankerous teachers (who also rue the fact that their summer freedom is no more) and Latin conjugations and basic calculus and historical dates and the horrors of the subjunctive in spoken French . . .
When you're an adult - especially one in the middle of life - the dawning of a new September is always accompanied by a psychic chill that underscores the encroaching autumnal tang in the air. Perhaps this chill is brought about by the declining hours of daylight, the heightened levels of communal metropolitan stress, the uneasy realisation that this time last year didn't seem that damn long ago.
Or perhaps the fall is just that - a time when that sense of shedding forces you to consider (for a moment or two anyway) the way everything is temporal and relentless . . . a cycle you're part of right now, but will carry on inexorably when you are no longer here.
It's starting, isn't it? An approximation of those same words were spoken to me in early September last year by a friend named Jim. At the time we were sitting on the terrace of the Café de Flore in Paris - opposite his apartment and not far from my own little pied-à-terre. Jim was a retired American diplomat - a man in his early 70s, elegant, witty, exceptionally literate and smart, and in good health. We were having an early-evening drink and I made some quasi-melancholic remark about the encroaching darkness and he smiled and said, "So it's starting again" - which could have been a reference to the early nightfall on the Boulevard St Germain . . . or my unfortunate habit of occasionally blurting out something existentially bleak at the wrong moment.
A short time after this, Jim was diagnosed, out of nowhere, with full-blown lymphoma - a cancer that killed him before the arrival of summer. His death was both unnerving and desperately unfair - especially as he was someone who took mischievous pleasure in life's absurdities and seemed to get such a kick out of the never-facile business of simply being here. Perhaps that's why this rentrée finds me thinking: can I really be turning 53 in a few weeks' time? Is there any solution to the relentless forward momentum of life? And is it ever really possible to "live in the moment" and all that other Zen crap? It's starting again, isn't it? But when did it stop in the first place?
Douglas Kennedy's eighth novel, The Woman in the Fifth, was published in June. He was recently made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Róisín Ingle returns next week