Summer

Our first summer, after the Board of Examiners. After the last Board of Studies. After graduation.

The summer, opening out. The summer, wide.

Like the summers of our PhD years. Like the summers of our distant childhoods.

The limitless. The Open. The infinite reach of summer.

 

Setting sail – when you can’t see the other shore.

 

Freed into summer. Given over to it. To summer. To the summer process.

 

Summer weeks, in the infinite. When the campus had died down. Except for foreign students. Come for academic English study courses.

 

Writing under the summer vault. In the summer halls.

Hatching into summer.

 

Summer writing. Summer in our sentences. Summer air in our prose.

 

The great rhythm of the academic year. It’s great turning, the academic year. Around the summer – around the fulcrum of summer.

 

The summer orbit of academia. The revolution around summer – the infinite expanse of summer.

 

Summer writing time. Summer reading time.

What was our reading project this year? Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in the original? Science of Logic, in the original? The complete Aquinas – the fucking lot – in the original? The entirety of Kierkegaard, the whole oeuvre, and learning Danish to read it along the way?

 

Summer ambition. Summer scale.

Chocs away, into summer skies.

Who did we imagine we’d be? What did we imagine we’d do this summer?

What was this summer’s need? This summer’s project?

What voyage would we take into the history of philosophy? Into the really hard stuff we never would have read otherwise? For which we’d never have the time.

Think big, we told ourselves! Think oeuvres! Think collected works! Think new languages!

 

Taking summer flight, borne up by summer wings.

 

In our summer offices. Fans blowing air, moving drowsily from side to side, in our offices.

 

The near-empty campus. The older lecturers – the old professors and the like – gone overseas for summer. Gone on holiday! Gone to conferences! Gone to holiday lets! Gone to gites, God knows. Gone to summer somewhere European.

And as happy just to be. Happy with campus peace. With the summer trance.

To work. To write: wasn’t that the ambition? Wasn’t that what we were about?

 

What language were we going to learn, this summer? Was this Danish summer (for Kierkegaard)? Should we learn Italian? What about Latin. Latin must be a good one.

 

Summer pacing. Summer cam. The summer measure, weeks going by. Blown like dandelion seeds by summer.

 

Summer of potential. Dreaming of what we could write. Of what we might read. Everything in the conditional. If only, if only.

 

Inexhaustible summer. That we’ll never be able to use up.

The summer condition. Summer without beginning and without end.

 

Work, yes, but souffle-light. Summer light. Work – but work with air inside it, like kneaded bread.

 

Work – but not focus. Work – but nothing productive.

Idled work. Work without work – that was more of a non-working than work.

Worklessness – but actively so – joyfully so.

Idling in work. As work. Unfolding work into the sky. Letting work blossom.

 

Non-work, where the non- was not privative. Where the non- was a shattering-open.

 

The song of work. What work always wanted to be. A giving up of work in work. A relinquishment. A laying down of tools, but in work.

Non work, that says, nothing will happen again. That says happening does not happen. Non-working that says, give it up – give everything up. But does so in work, and as work.

 

Work – rather, the contemplation of work. Work as contemplation – as detached from work, fallen out of step with it – and with everything.

 

Time outside time – summer outside summer. The eternal promise of summer that never arrives and never could arrive. That never begins, but is there nonetheless.

The unreal summer. Drowsy. Heavy Turgid. As though underwater. Summer through which we swim.

 

Heavy days. Humid days. Threatening to gather in a final thunderstorm. To gather up in a cloudburst.

Unstable summer. Menacing summer. Was it from these summer clouds from which lightning will come?

 

Summer slipped out of phase. Summer escaped from summer. On another track. Summer sidelined, Summer shunted.

 

Summer curtains in the breeze. The summer culmination. Summer billowing.

 

The brow of summer.

 

Turbulent summer. Turbid summer. Summer that seeks release. That seeks cloud burst. Cumuli-nimbus stacked kilometres high. Towering. Greying. Full of rain. Gravid with lightning.

 

The other summer, like Blanchot’s other night.

 

To have time – the gift of time. The openness of time. The cry of time.

 

The summer of study. When study respires. Where stupidity breathes.

 

The summer of summer. The ultimate summer. Summer squeezed into a glass.