Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life.

Hal Borland (1900–1978) was an American journalist and nature writer best known for reflective essays on the New England landscape and the changing seasons. This quotation is widely circulated in collections of seasonal and nature writing and is consistent with Borland’s recurring theme: that the natural year’s turning—summer into autumn, light into dark—offers a model for accepting change in human life. The imagery of tides and moon phases draws on coastal and rural observation, typical of Borland’s essayistic style, where everyday natural cycles become moral or philosophical instruction about patience, loss, and renewal.

The line argues that wanting perpetual “summer” is a kind of spiritual immaturity: a desire for constant abundance, pleasure, or ease. By comparing that wish to demanding “high tide always” and “a full moon every night,” Borland stresses that constancy would erase meaning. Rhythms—ebb and flow, waxing and waning, growth and decline—create contrast, and contrast is what makes experience intelligible. Autumn’s arrival becomes a metaphor for necessary endings and transitions; without them, we would lose the capacity to recognize beauty, anticipate return, or understand life as a patterned, living process rather than a flat, unchanging state.