As Summer Comes to an End

I spent my valuable hours reading and thinking and pondering and losing myself in many books this summer, on lazy afternoons underneath a swath of sunlight streaming in through gauzy curtains, beside dim light casted by a bedside lamp as I fell asleep, beneath lacy shadows of foliage as I laid on a picnic blanket, or curled up in the library with my headphones on. With each summer it feels like I laugh a little more, cry a little harder, and think a little deeper. I’d like to think of it all as sucking the marrow out of life

Everything is momentary and life goes on, yet the experiences I pick up from my books are eternal. From one of my favorite reads of this summer, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, “In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.” Sometimes I wish for anything but to keep my place in this demanding world that really owes us nothing. But there’s a beauty in the way we are able to carve out spaces for ourselves where we feel we belong, with people we enjoy. My online community is one of those spaces for me. And there is nothing I love quite as much as filling my mind with rubbish and facts and writing more rubbish and facts for other people to fill their minds with. Sally Rooney puts it into words in Normal People: “Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”