Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4)

by Ali Smith

Getting old is pathetic if you use it as an excuse for no longer being responsible.

How does it feel now, then? he said. Now then, she said. An interesting verbal construct. A what what? he said. The past and the present together, she said. Now. Then.

It’s that the foulness happening every day round us is a growth without roots. Goodness is more like turnip! The foulness just wants one thing, more of its self. It wants self self self self nothing but self over and over again. I begin to realize that this makes it very like the blowaway moss that spreads fast across everything but can easily be kicked away because its grip is only about surface. Just the act of thinking this kicks it loose and blows it away.

The English word for summer comes from the Old English sumor, from the proto-indo-european root sam, meaning both one and together.

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.

But that’s summer for you. Summer’s like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because summer isn’t just a merry tale. Because there’s no merry tale without the darkness.

What trendy vicar thinks Nick Drake is good church music? He’s right. Hymn to timeless melancholy. Hymn to English summer.

I wish they’d stop using war language, war imagery. This isn’t a war. The opposite of a war is happening. The pandemic is making walls and borders and passports as meaningless as nature knows they are.

Me neither, Charlotte said. What would Einstein say? He’d say, Robert said, that the human species got our best intellectual tools from looking at the stars. But that this doesn’t make the stars responsible for what we do with our intellects. Wow, Charlotte said. Robert. What a great thing to say.