Meditations on Late Summer

The start of every summer is always so full of excitement—the promise of endless free time, lazy mornings, late nights, swimming in pools and oceans, climbing trees and mountains, reading books. Every year around late May, the summer looms so large. It seems so immense. Those endless days! Those boozy low-pressure thunderstorm nights! And so little that must be done!

I used to make “summer plans” every May when school ended: plans that including a list of books to read, projects to work on, relationships to pursue, etc. But invariably, most of these “plans” never really materialized. June would come and go, July would be a flurry of vacation, August would start and so would school. Soon it was football and marching band and getting the right calculator for math class. Pep rallies, bonfires, ever shortening sunlight. Summer a fading memory. Another year passing.

The students are slowing finding their way back to Biola’s campus these days. I work full time here so I’ve been on campus all summer, enjoying the quiet quad and near-empty cafeteria. But all that changes this week as another school year begins. Things will get lively again. The rhythms of work and study and discipline return. It’s definitely exciting. But it also means the summer is over.

At the start of this summer, way back in mid-May when school let out and graduates dispersed, I took a trip to England. I stayed for a while in C.S. Lewis’ house, The Kilns, in Oxford. I slept in each morning, summer-style. I wrote in the flowering gardens. I took walks to the pond on misty/cool afternoons. When I didn’t feel like writing, I read books that I found in the library. Everything Lewis ever wrote was there on the shelves, and some of it was new to me. I picked up a book of Lewis’ poetry one day, in which I came across this poem. I’m not sure when he wrote it or if it was ever published, but it sounds like he wrote it late in life. It captures a lot of what “late summer” means, I think:

Late Summer

I, dusty and bedraggled as I am,
Pestered with wasps and weed and making jam,
Blowzy and stale, my welcome long outstayed,
Proved false in every promise that I made,
At my beginning I believed, like you,
Something would come of all my green and blue.
Mortals remember, looking on the thing
I am, that I, even I, was once a spring.

There’s a lot of regret in those words, as in every August. The regret of things that never quite materialize, love that never happens the way you thought it would, barbecue experiments that go slightly awry.

Ah, the end of summer. It’s about change, aging, and looking back. Just ask Yasujiro Ozu, whose penultimate film was entitled The End of Summer and who, like C.S. Lewis, died in 1963. Or ask Rilke, whose poem “Autumn Day” evokes the late summer in its famous opening line: “Lord, it is time: The summer was immense.”

Indeed. It was immense. There is still sand in my suitcase. But it’s time to move on.