The End of Another Summer

As I stepped outside today, the sun was setting and the air was warm, yet breezy. A few wispy clouds were lit up with a pink and orange glow, creating a striking contrast against the rapidly darkening blue sky. As I watched it, I was struck with an appreciation for the beauty hidden in our world, and how easy it is to let it go by, never taking time to soak it all in. For me the feeling in the air evoked a wistful reminder of summers past.

Summer was invariably the most fun time of the year when I was little. My days were spent playing in the pool, building forts in the backyard and riding my bike around my neighborhood. Nights often involved catching lightening bugs. Other days would be spent having wars with water and Nerf guns, or playing with GI Joes in the dirt. The longer days meant staying up later, and with no obligations during the day, how I spent my time was limited only by my imagination.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a truly idle summer. Like most, I had summer jobs throughout college and much of high school, which simply takes away so much time that the summer doesn’t quite feel the same. But I think that imagination is what I really miss, something I can never quite get back - the sense of wonder that fills a little kid as he experiences so many things in the world around him for the first time. As we get older the extraordinary becomes the ordinary and soon lightening bugs captivate us only momentarily, out of a sense of nostalgia more than anything else.

So as this Labor Day marks the unofficial end of the summer, the sunset I saw today reminded me of feeling I get at the end of every summer. A mixture of reminiscence and regret, wishing I was little again, so I could truly enjoy the summer and wondering if this year I didn’t pass by too many opportunities to enjoy another one. The end of the summer always reminds of The Great Gatsby, a great novel if you’ve never read it. My favorite passage is the last one of the book, and I think F. Scott Fitzgerald conveys this feeling much better than I:

On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . and one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I hope you all had a great summer.