there comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it
Goodbye summer. I'm going to miss iced coffees the most
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This edition's subject line is from the 1977 speech 'The Green Fields of the Mind' by Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, who died 32 years ago, just at the end of summer, on 1st September 1989 (he is worth googling).
His piece begins: "It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart," and only burrows deeper under your skin from there. Hearing these words on the radio is how baseball fans know that the season, and their hope for that year, is over.
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Hi there,
It's September, somehow.
Today was the day when I felt it. This afternoon I couldn't work, propped up on the sofa that ruins my back, looking out at the sunlight. I watched it fade. The last of summer, I thought, melodramatically. I re-read 'The Green Fields of the Mind' and thought about how sad it was that the writer didn't get that many years to live after he gave that speech.
It's my second-favourite time of year, summer becoming autumn, (the first of course being winter giving way to spring, the first blossom). They're the most dramatic moments of change, unlike spring into summer, or autumn into winter, which are impossible to pinpoint. In those pairs, the second season is just an intensification of the first.
There's been a lot of talk of Hot Girl Summer this year, after 15 months of lockdowns (and maybe more to come), but the general consensus (of people who write hot takes online) is that it's been a disappointment. But isn't every summer a beautiful disappointment?
Our school days mark out the long summers as a special time, freed from the constraints of the daily routine, but soon bound by the expectations of movies and literature and love songs and all the other kids we know who've been influenced by them too, who are aching for adulthood just as much as we are. This summer will be the summer I blossom. I'll show them all!
But it doesn't work like that. Change happens to us, within us, incrementally, and it doesn't just wait for the sunniest months. We all fantasise(d) about walking back into school (and later, the office) in September as our most optimised selves, the one who's going to be the subject of everyone's crushes, get onto all the teams, get As without trying in all our exams. We want to be whispered about, but with awe, rather than usual mean teenage / workplace stuff. But this one perfect, public moment of our worth being recognised by our friends and foes, well, it never happens.
Stories have a lot to answer for, particularly the right-of-passage story, which focusses on teenagers, and give the heroes and heroines these perfect moments. These stories are always written by people who have left their teens, and are looking back on a simpler time with rose-tinted glasses.
We had a summer. We didn't change. Isn't that the real triumph? We survived intact, remaining exactly ourselves. There will be more summers in which we don't change. And they will be just as perfect as this one was, always too short and full of yearning.
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Links of the week
Those words whose meanings existed in no dictionary, I sent to them, as if almost to tell them, without quite being able to explain it to myself, that they had done well to send me to this school in Calcutta, that experiences that could not have been available to me in Siliguri, the small town where I had grown up for the last fifteen years, were at last now mine.
That culture of hustle and greed disguised as effortless relaxation created Jimmy Buffett and Margaritaville. Many of his songs, and now his resorts and restaurants, and the entire aura he projects, are about escape from your life, which assumes your life is something you want to escape.
But climate control also reshaped the city’s architecture, making it a less human place. Instead of arranging rooms around a courtyard, air conditioning encouraged the building of tightly stacked flats and offices. By blasting exhaust air out of buildings, it intensifies the heat on the streets, driving people to seek shelter indoors.
Rilke’s verse as haunted by its own ghosts – of classical forms and mythological heroes, and above all of the passing moment, the essential ephemerality of experience that even a poet as powerful as Rilke is powerless to change.
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What I've been up to
I was on last week's episode of The Week Unwrapped, talking Meat-Free Mondays and more
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Other upcoming stuff
My personal essays masterclass with London Writer’s Salon is BACK on 9th September! The Super Early Bird tickets are sold out, but there is ONE EARLY BIRD ticket left, before you’re left with the standard rate. This masterclass always sells out and has a waiting list, so get in fast!
I took this week off stand-up, but I'm back from next week with gigs and comedy competitions! If you'd like to see me in action, keep an eye on my Insta Stories and Twitter for up-to-date info!
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That’s all from me! Thank you for reading, I’ve been and continue to be Suchandrika Chakrabarti.
I plan to keep this newsletter free, but it does take time to write and curate. If you fancy buying me a Ko-fi I’d be eternally grateful, and will thank you in the next newsletter <3