“A night in July! What can be likened to it? How can one describe it? Shall I compare it to the core of an enormous black rose, covering us with the dreams of hundreds of velvety petals? The night winds blow open its fluffy center, and in its scented depth we can see the stars looking down on us.” – Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (trans. Wieniewska)
Aestivus estivus
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4 thoughts on “Aestivus estivus”
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This is indeed what I feel when I walk into my garden at night. But the days! Currently they are so sweltering, so slow and wrenching I’d almost sooner have ice all around.
I think that with age winter has become a closer friend.
Here in New Mexico we’ve had a slow, sweltering, wrenching summer. The rainy season has begun at last, but we’re having the worst drought in generations, with water rationing in parts of the state. Hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forests and high grasslands have burned. Towns have had to be evacuated and some homes and businesses have burned down. The whole month of June, the skies were steeped in smoke sometimes so thick it turned the sun into a bright red ball before obscuring it completely, and the only rain then was the rain of fine black and gray ash from the cindered forests.
Last winter we were stabbed by a mass of cold air colder than we’ve had in many years, reaching all the way down into far west Texas. The natural gas supplies to several towns were knocked out for days, and electricity and potable water supplies were disrupted. Much vegetation was killed down to the hibernating roots, leaving much tinder for this spring and summer’s devastating wildfires.
As we age, spring and summer become poignant reminders of what once was and what might have been, while winter becomes our only friend, until we are at last wrapped in the cold embrace of the grave.
What harsh weather! Just like Australia where I grew up. Here in Italy the weather seems much more cosmetic, though the economic tides are turning and I’m not sure what is coming next.
I’ve never been to Australia, but I read about some terrible wildfires there just a few years back. The fires we have here in New Mexico are never that bad, though they are bad enough. We get very little rain and snow, and if they don’t come as expected, the droughts are crippling.
As for the economy, it does at times seem the Eurozone is a monetary conflagration about to erupt. Italy has one of the largest economies in the world, but it’s fragile, as they all are these days. A Greek default, or a default by Ireland or Portugal, could trigger a liquidity crisis for Italy. But if the American government can’t pull its collective head out of its collective ass over the next two weeks, we all get to experience the liquidity crisis of global financial meltdown.