The Phenomenology of a Falling Leaf

Professor Aleksander Voss had spent forty-one years teaching that the world was inexhaustible to thought, and now, with perhaps eleven weeks left in which to think, he had decided to test the proposition on a single leaf.

The diagnosis had arrived in September, in the dry administrative language by which mortality is now communicated, and Aleksander had received it the way he received everything, as a problem in epistemology. He was not afraid, or told himself he was not, which amounts in a philosopher to the same evasion it does in everyone else. What he felt, sitting in the consultant's office with his daughter Mira's hand cold in his own, was something closer to professional embarrassment — that he had written nine books on perception and consciousness and the structures of lived time, and that he did not, when it came to it, understand a single one of the things he had spent his life describing. He had theorized the world. He had never once met it. And the gap between the theory and the thing, which had seemed in good health a fascinating abstraction, now seemed the only fact that mattered, and he had eleven weeks to close it.

He chose the leaf on the first morning of October, from the copper beech outside his study window, the great tree under which he had proposed to his late wife and beneath which, in a manner of speaking, he had conducted his entire interior life. There were perhaps two hundred thousand leaves on it. He chose one — high on the western limb, three-lobed, already going from green to the particular bronze that the beech wears before it lets go — and he resolved that before he died he would understand, completely and without remainder, the event of its falling. Not the physics of it, though the physics were part. Not the biology of abscission, the cork layer forming at the petiole, though that too. He meant the whole of it: the leaf as it was lived, the falling as a phenomenon, the entire irreducible event in all its aspects at once, the thing itself and not the idea of the thing, grasped before the grasping organ was switched off forever. One leaf, understood entire. It seemed to him, that first morning, both absurdly modest and the most ambitious project he had ever conceived.