The Case For Summer

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 60, 12 March 1938, Page 3 (Supplement)

The Case For Summer

8y... Bart Sutherland

Shakespeare, who knew just about everything, talked about hot summer's tanlings and the shrinking slaves of winter." The colour coinage is so pithy that it might be recommended to the British Colour Council as a suitable sheath for beauty; but should like to dispute the statement in general. So far from shrinking into winter, I should like to take a triumphant march into it; for Apollo the Far-Darter has seen fit to severely burn that part of my legs foolishly revealed beneath shorts. "Be thine arrows winged with pestilence," said Zeus, his father. Yes, indeed; and I'm inclined to agree with those ancients who held that the sun god ever demanded blood sacrifice; and that this burning is a feeble modern way of extracting it.

And yet this summer looks so very nice 011 appearances. What is its lesson? With the eternal cold balance of the gods, Zeus, while handing out the darts, said also: "Thou shalt be lord not of death only, but of healing and life. Moreover, I will make thee niy prophet and interpreter unto mortals." With summer there comes a content with living for its own sake. Ambitionless for a, little space we are contcnt to sit still •n this interlude that is not granted for Jmig. And surely this is a heavenly dower, for "to do nothing at all," as O-car Wilde remarked, "is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual." But now. effortless, we lie 011 the sand. The books to which we had meant to give such assiduous devotion slip away from idle fingers, and the mind is open to vagrant ideas. We view life in the mystic ritual of the dancing of Tanarore, the shimmering heat, daughter of the sun god and the summer maid. She makes queer passes before our eyes, inducing an almost Buddhistic contemplation, and divulging queer knowledge we had not known before.

First she places before us a colour poem : the sands burn like gold dust scattered; on them, never still, like the bright colours of a kaleidoscope, are little jumping jacks of children, not yet subdued by the sun. The sea —to describe it as sapphire or turquoise or cobalt blue, or even a mixture of these three, would be untrue. For into its magic vat, a reflection of the heavens, there have fallen all the azure jewels of earth. And on it there drift the white butterfly wings of men's yachts, but they are not so immaculate, these, as the break of the surf on the reef far out. nor the sea-washed purity of a seagull's breast. But so jewel-like is the whole scene that it is a relief to rest the eyes on the myrtle locks of a pohutukawa fringing a great tawny cliff

with a face like an Epstein statue, the effect being of a god at rest. But a return to the more animated scene reveals now a study in rhythm and sound. The never-ceasing calls of the children are the sounds of earth; but more eternal still is the chorus of the waves of the sea, overpowering the little sounds and representing the rhythm of law. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, looking round as she would for an excuse for the tinkle-tinkle of rhyme in verse, declared gushingly of that master, the sea: "Oh, I knew as I counted, I knew the tenth billow would rhyme with the first." The blank verse of Milton would perhaps best describe that majesty, but even that would be mortal and inadequate. The seagulls glissade without effort in a long salute to this sea, and thought falls with them into an abyss of not thinking at all.

One of the finest pictures of summer ever painted, communicating its very inertia, is that at the opening of "Little Dorrit," where Dickens shows the city of Marseilles live before us white, unwinking and breathless. "Evecything in Marseilles and about Marseilles had stared at the fervid sky and been stared at in return until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. . . . The universal stare made the eyes ache. ..." But such a scene is only transiently true. This sand, too, stares, and the sun god tries to hypnotise; but watch again the children and the sea and the gulls and the trees gently swaying. Even Dickens admitted to a little movement in his picture, for he noted that towards the Italian coast the universal stare was a little relieved by "light clouds of mist, slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea, but it softened nowhere else." Here the wind rustles the hair of the earth: the little grasses and the forest trees, and sometimes going contrary to the changeless course of the sea causes long hoary locks of sea spray to fling about in restless confusion until one dreamily anticipates communion with Neptune himself. Like man's, the fine old body of the earth is a serene, enduring thing, but it is fanned by a celestial unrest. My legs are hurting, and I should like a drink of water, but some kind of

supernatural negative has been developed in my mind and I can't move. I flatter myself that 1 have got into quite an advanced state of Oriental contemplation, until I remember than an Indian himself talked of "the pseudospirituality and mysticism that are the most accursed heritage of India. Preoccupation with the 'soul' before one has learnt to look at the body."

Perhaps I had better get up and get that drink. Gritting my teeth, for the legs are swollen, I make a painful wav to the house, where I counter-reflect that that true Englishman, the late G. K. Chesterton, once said that he could stand any kind of weather but that known as "a fine day." What would he have said about a right royal summer? He was right: spiritual 'in outlook, routined in the austerity of student life, he knew how nearly he stood on the dangerous edge of do-nothing.

As I stand at the door, drinking my water, I try to balance it up. Is summer a mere breach in life, not to be relied on ? The grass that I look at is comfortless and arid; the flowers are unsatisfactory; odd, worn-out roses, like us, wanting a tonic; aliens, cerise petunias from an Oriental harem; gold en-turban nod African marigolds; rigid zinnias, scarlet and gold, soldiers of a cruel Caliph, given to torture. Drinking, I think inconWquently, "water is a great mystery. . . . Hath the rain a fatlier, and who hath begotten the drops of dew?'' Only the summer could make me think like'that. But then so are ice creams and milk shakes mysteries. I am rapidly coming to earth. All this hazy half-knowledge that I've collected must be the result of a mild sunstroke. Oiiiy one piece of stable knowledge have I gained: I'm rapidly Incoming an authority on sunburn balms. For the rest I think summer a garish temptress, and I shall spend the rest of the season being thoroughly British and doing something. It would be a good idea to knit plenty of woollies so that I thoroughly enjoy the winter.