Yesterday, I listened to a new album by a folk singer named Kacey Musgraves. The second song on the album is titled “Deeper Well,” and it begins with the lines,
My Saturn has returned
When I turned 27, everything started to change
A full orbit of Saturn takes between 28-30 years, but Musgraves may be following the idea that the beginning of the “influence” of Saturn begins at age 27. She’s leaning on one of the better-known truths of astrology: Saturn is associated with the full-entrance into adulthood. It marks the moment when a person has ripened, or blossomed, or “peaked.” Saturn was, of course, the Roman conflation of the Greek God Cronus, the god of Time. If you’ve ever walked through the Forum in Rome, you won’t have missed the still-standing row of columns that once marked the front of Saturn’s Temple:
There is a beautiful and little-known line in one of Emily Dickinson’s poems: “Ruin is Formal — Devil’s work.” It captures the idea of the predictability of decay. Nothing lasts forever. This post is about the art of recognizing when decay begins, and appreciating the moment just before decay begins: full ripeness.
Which of course brings us to… scuppernong grapes. They are a late-summer favorite among old-timer Southern Americans. To speak technically, the scuppernong is a variety of muscadine, about twice as large as the common white grape which is found in grocery stores. Unlike the white grape, it has not been made “seedless” by genetic modifications, so there is an acquired art to enjoying scuppernongs. What’s more, eating them is not the only skill required for fully enjoying what the scuppernong can offer. Most amateurs, encountering them for the first time, will pick them severely under-ripe, supposing that they ought to look about like a common white grape. In fact, experience teaches that the perfect scuppernong should be a bronze-rose color, and should, surprisingly, feel a little “loose” in the skin.
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of “perfection” for a long time — and my go-to example when trying to discuss this with newcomers to the thought has always been the scene of fruit selection. In a grocery store, standing before the inclined rows of apples, or at a strawberry farm in early Spring, there is pleasure in examining and comparing the individual manifestations of the fruits, discarding this one for a bruise and that one for a worm. In a way that feels almost pre-conscious, the mind recognizes better and worse automatically, and naturally seeks the example that most closely approaches the platonic form of the fruit.
In recent decades, various documentaries and books about health food have made genetic modification familiar to most Americans, and “organic” and “heirloom” categories are becoming standard offerings at quality grocery stores. What I think is less well-appreciated is the sometimes near 10,000-year process, most of which took place “automatically,” of simply selecting the best examples from each harvest, preserving the seeds, and using them during the next season. It is deeply fascinating to imagine a Bronze Age farmer breaking open a seedy watermelon hardly bigger than his fist and intuiting that it is good, but that it would be better if it were 10x larger, seedless, and sweeter. I love the thought of those early aesthetes, our first foodies, carefully extracting the seeds from the largest, sweetest fruit, year after year — with one eye on eternity. What a gift they created for their progeny.
Most of us are badly out of practice. We sort of take what the grocery store gives us. Bananas picked dark-green in Peru ripen for weeks as they are transported to America, where they are sold, perhaps almost a month after coming off the tree, five-for-a-dollar, to barely-conscious Americans. The meat we eat — well, let’s not even think about it took much. Still, all it takes is a half-day trip to an orchard this Fall. You can pick up the thread: each fruit grows, grows, approaches its perfect moment of ripeness, and then, if it is not picked and enjoyed, begins to decay.
This brings us to Sydney Sweeney, who turns 27-years old on September 12th. If you’re on the internet, you can’t have missed her over the past four years. Here’s a picture of her from August of this year, just before Saturn began to make his influence felt:
She’s very pretty, obviously. And this post — which is obviously a kind of clickbait — is not intended to take her down a peg, or to serve as some kind of classic manosphere “neg.” But she has been very pretty, indeed very sexy, publicly, for a number of years now. And for that reason, I want to use her case to illustrate a point about life and about the world in general. Casual readers may miss the point, and spiteful feminists would surely rage against the very idea, but here goes: last year, to speak in analogy, Sydney Sweeney had that bronze-rose scuppernong color, that loosening skin that signified the moment of peak juiciness. And this year, that moment is passing.
And that’s okay! She’s still a human. In fact, maybe she’ll be even more human now. I’d love to have her on my podcast—you’re welcome any time to discuss your favorite book, Syd. But in terms of ripeness, and in relation to the memento mori, she has, we must admit, hit the wall. Again: this is not a failure. She did nothing wrong. She has surfed her wave, and what a wave it was, perfectly. But as Solomon said, “God has made everything beautiful in its time.”
I cultivate irises, the flowers, in my home garden. They are a perennial plant, and each Spring, predictably, around March 25th, I see the first sign of the bud atop the stem-tuber rising out, from within, one of the green blades of the plant. By April 15th, my anticipation peaking, the bud reveals what color it will be (for I have many varieties). And one day later, it opens:
Inevitably, I think of the absolutely lascivious lines from Wallace Stevens,
The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.
Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.
Already the new-born children interpret loveIn the voices of mothers.
Timeless mother,
How is it that your aspic nipples
For once vent honey?
The pine-tree sweetens my body.
The white iris beautifies me.
The poem is “In the Carolinas,” and it refers readers to just this moment that I’m speaking of: for two days, maybe three, each Spring in Carolina, all suffering seems to cease. The green of the forest almost hurts your eyes. The blue sky seems to quench winter-weary eyes of some deficiency. Nature relents, the birds call to us, the bees greet us as we bend to imbibe the scent of the iris. Every year, I cut the first one, place it in a vase, some kind of ritual sacrifice. As I cut its stem, I feel gratitude, and try to appreciate its approach to perfection.
Each of us — men and women — approach this moment, and then pass it. I think it is right to speak of Saturn’s return as an approximate mark of this moment, if because it might provoke us to consider “where we are” in life. In my mid-40s, with back pain, I know decay has set in. I cannot sprint as I once did, am not as strong. But even in retrospect, it is hard to pinpoint when I went over the top, when I “hit the wall.” I suspect almost everyone denies that their moment has come. Almost everyone thinks they have a few more years of growth before their decline begins. This is why the entire idea of “the wall” feels so offensive to women. The point is, every woman (and every man) will eventually, if they are lucky, arrive at a year where, no matter how much they work out, no matter how carefully they diet, they would do well to admit: last year, I was hotter. It is a matter of realism.
I think this is why some flames burn out around age 27: they know their moment even as it is happening—they strike while the iron is hot. It’s not just Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, it’s also Jesus. But you don’t have to die, you can also do what Buddha did in his 29th year: get enlightened. The point is: this is the “most-you” you’ll ever be, and what remains after that is a process of decay.
On behalf of all Americans, I want to say thank you to Sydney Sweeney. Someone really should have sculpted her. And no matter how this sounds, I want to preface it one more time by saying this is no failure on her part: but Sydney was hotter in 2023 than she was in 2024, and that’s when she should’ve been sculpted. Here she was last year:
It’s also, god forgive us, when she should’ve gotten pregnant. “Lol,” but seriously. The miracle in all of this is that even as Sydney begins to decay, harsh as that sounds, a new crop will come along, just as new irises will emerge next Spring. I love Jesus’ teaching on this point:
No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved.
It is such an interesting point. We want to preserve our old attachments. As a nation, even, we loved Sydney. But we cannot preserve her forever. Moreover, we cannot try to replace her with a new version that merely imitates her: nature renews and changes. Still, nostalgia runs deep, and Jesus adds a surprising comment at the end of that parable: “No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better.” I think what he’s talking about there is the inclination for each generation to stay loyal to its best and brightest. Maybe Kobe Bryant was better than Michael Jordan, but I’ll never say so. And maybe there will, someday, a decade from now, be a woman even more worth launching a thousand ships for than SS was — but I suspect zoomers will never admit it.
Ripeness is a thing of God, a sign of grace in the world. To recognize it requires careful observation and discernment — and to let it pass, unenjoyed, unpicked, is a kind of tragedy. The tension implicit in this question is obvious: women and men are sentient, and we feel that we are more than merely physical, so it feels demeaning or spiteful to point out when physical decay has set in. But it is good practice, I think, to learn to discern when a thing is as good as it gets. Sometimes I suspect we have lived through just such a moment in civilization. Perhaps decay will follow, but if you lived it right, you enjoyed it at its sweetest. Saturn, remember, ate his own children.
Happy birthday, Sydney!