The hush comes with the deepening of Autumn; but it comes gradually. Our ears are attuned to it, day by quieter day. But even now, if one awakens in the deep darkness of the small hours, one can hear it, a foretaste of Winter silence. It’s a little painful now, and a little lonely because it is so strange.

Borland evokes the seasonal shift not as a visual spectacle but as an acoustic and emotional one: autumn’s “hush” arrives by degrees until it becomes perceptible even in the night’s smallest hours. The passage suggests that nature’s transitions educate perception—our “ears are attuned” through repeated, incremental quieting. The “foretaste of Winter silence” frames winter as both culmination and absence, a deeper stillness that can feel uncanny. The pain and loneliness he notes are less despair than the discomfort of encountering strangeness: the world’s familiar soundscape thinning, reminding the listener of solitude, mortality, and the approach of dormancy.