Celebrating Summer

July 15, 2016

Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s blog.

Summer is a time of travel. More vacations are taken during the summer than any other time throughout the year. Friends and relatives visit, kids laze around pools or fields and school is out of session. Summer is very likely the only time that we can glimpse an idea of what it might be like to have an endless moment. In the same way that lemonade refreshes, summertime is also meant to cool and calm us. We are lucky to have seasons and schedules that display time in all of its wondrous variety, from the rush of the end of school, to the stillness of a moment alone or relaxing on a beach. The following quotes celebrate this season, this relaxation and rejuvenation of the human spirit and are meant only to be sipped with the early morning light. Enjoy the scenery of the moment. Enjoy the summer!

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate:/ Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May/ And summer’s lease hath all too short a date” – William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 18”

“How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.” – William Wordsworth

“Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.” – Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.” – Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came; and if the village had been beautiful at first, it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its richness. The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine, which lay stretched out beyond. The earth had donned her mantle of brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad. It was the prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing.” – Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.” – Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Green was the silence, wet was the light,/ the month of June trembled like a butterfly.” – Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“The summer night is like a perfection of thought.” – Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm”

“In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.” – John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.”
―Truman Capote, Summer Crossing

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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