Idling Summer

Think of the campus summer, postgraduates. Let it warm your hearts.

The idling summer, postgraduates: think of that. Weeks without mooring. Weeks of summer voyage. Summer languor. Summer luxuriance. The great summer stretching of limbs.

Draw strength from it, postgraduates: the inexhaustible summer! The summer that you can never use up! The summer that never ends! That is always but a dream of summer – the summer of inexhaustible potential. In which great things could be done. No: could be undone. Think of the undoing of things – of the untwisting of things. Of the idling of summer.

Think of the summer of hope – of idled hope, postgraduates. Of idled work. Of idled reading – and writing. Of work without work – about unpicking the stitches. Untying the knots.

Think of the summer release.

Not work, but the contemplation of work, postgraduates. Not work, but study detached from work, fallen out of step with work. That remains out of phase with anything productive …

When summer time seems to lose all direction, postgraduates. When summertime seemed to sink into itself – lie down. Think of time pools. Of time hazes, like heat over summer roads. Think of the air turned thick. Of the air turned runny.

Think of passing through the summer’s eye, postgraduates. Through the summer mirror. Think of stepping across the summer threshold.

Study that hovers, postgraduates. Study that is there in the air. Study above. Study that is a staring into a space. Without softly-focused eyes. A softly focused head!

Gliding study. Circling study.

And thinks of breaks from study, very much part of study, postgraduates. Taking the summer air. Walking the campus, for air. Watching the groundsmen getting the lawns ready for graduation. Replanting plants. Tidying it up, the campus. Installing the sign, Mercia University, in six foot letters, as a backdrop for photos.

And walking into town, for air. To look through vinyl at Beatdown Records. To buy a snack at Marks and Spencers.

And didn’t we even go to the coast? Didn’t we even walk on Longsands. Walk at Blyth. Walk at Seaton Sluice. And didn’t we go out for drinks in the evenings? To the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley? Or to catch a film at the Star and Shadow?

Think of the joy of summer, postgraduates. Vaster than us. Vaster than we are. And to be lost, in that vastness. To be part of that vastness. And to offer up our work to that vastness. And to work in the name of vastness. That is more than you. And above you. And below you. The warm sky and the warm earth. Think of summer’s eternal youth, postgraduates. Its perennial faith. Its perpetual beginning, that’s never exhausted, that’s forever ahead. Its secret childhood, that hasn’t happened yet.