Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4)

by Ali Smith

As a writer from the last century so devoutly said, Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history. Her mother had come into her bedroom without knocking, again, and was standing reading the screen over Sacha’s shoulder. Oh, that’s good, that quote, her mother said, I like that. I like it too, Sacha said. Is devoutly the right word? her mother said. It sounds more philosophical than devotional. Is it a devotional writer? Who wrote it? Yes, it’s a devotional writer, Sacha said though she’d no idea, didn’t know who wrote it and had written the word devoutly because devoutly sounded good in the sentence. But now with her mother breathing down her neck and holding forth about who, she brought up Startpage and typed in the words irreversible, flow, history. The quote came up. Someone european-sounding, she said. Ah. It’s Arendt, Hannah Arendt, her mother said. I’d like to read Arendt on forgiveness, I’d like that a lot right now. Ironic, Sacha thought, given that neither her father nor her mother looked likely to forgive each other anything any time soon. Though I don’t know that I’d call her a devotional, her mother said. What’s the source? Brainyquote, Sacha said. That’s not a source, her mother said. Does it give the original source? Look. It doesn’t. That’s terrible. The source is Brainyquote, Sacha said. That’s where I found the quote. You can’t just put down Brainyquote as your source, her mother said. Yes I can, Sacha said. You need better source...

summer can fuck off, it’s never as good as you think it’ll be, usually shit weather and even if it is hot now hot just means a whole other kind of shit weather in which it’s too hot to do anything, and the leaves hang off the trees going a duller filthier colour by the week and everywhere smells of shit and sick, all the litter bins smell of off milk, the whole season is like the smell round a rubbish truck as it moves through the city and like you’re stuck on a bike behind it going way too slowly down a too-narrow street.

a prison is always a prison, even in August when the sky is blue.

I have really had enough of sadness. There is so much this year. And we are lucky.

But I believe one good thing that will come out of this is that my already trampled on generation will be evermore resilient. We will be aware of how lucky we are to spend time with our friends because we will know what it’s like to live without them. And by God we will treasure our freedoms and we will fight for them in the name of all that is good.

I have a vision that the modern sense of being a hero is like shining a bright light on things that need to be seen. I guess that if someone does this it brings its own consequences. For instance if you are a bright light on social media, then people get quite angry and will attack you equally as much as they are drawn like moths to your flame. But now maybe we will realize that we have to stop being poisonous to each other and the world. I know how naive that is, because poisonous stuff has never stopped happening. Our history class on zoom was zoombombed with a porn image which we all saw, for example. But I guess there will always be porn and poison, and human beings will always have to decide whether to be poisonous to others or not, whether we are in a pandemic or not.

Creativity is cultural not because it is derivative of it, but because it aims to heal culture. Art saturated with the unconscious acts like a compensatory dream in the individual: it tries to rebalance and address deep-rooted problems.

A sad tale’s best for winter. So Shakespeare injects sadness, like a device, a playwright’s device, he infects things with winter precisely so that he can have a summer, make a merry tale come out of a sad one.

Do you think you have to be related, to be family? Charlotte said. I think it helps, Sacha said. And hinders.