Summer’s a knife
—Taylor Swift, “Cruel Summer”
I don’t consider myself a Harry Potter aficionado—I actually like J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective novels more—but there was always one part of the saga that really resonated with me: the fact that every summer during his Hogwarts years Harry always had to go back to his adoptive Dursleys on Privet Drive in the fictive town Little Whinging. (Rowling has such a wonderfully Dickensian way with names!) There he would have to endure months of tedium, abuse, and isolation while he waited for the new term to begin. Ironically, home was exile and school was home.
Now, I’m no wizard, and I was fortunate to have far more supportive relatives than Harry did. But the notion that real life is school life continues to decisively shape my consciousness. That I consider myself a bona fide weirdo for thinking so is more awkward still. Some of this is a matter of social class: I was not a kid whose parents could send me off to camp or take long vacations, and though I now live in what may be plausibly called affluence, my summer plans generally remain modest.
(I’m pleased that I was able to send my kids off to sports and enrichment camps of various kinds, though for many years my soccer-coach wife was the very active and demanding director of what we called Mommy Camp.)
A bigger part of the problem, though, was my irredeemable nerdiness. I spent my entire high school and college careers with part-time jobs in libraries. Summers were the time when I did things like read War and Peace or try to get the sequence of events surrounding the Battle of Hastings straight. One of the most important calibrations I’ve had to make in my job is always keeping in mind that most of the students I teach regard the experience of going to school the way I would feel about a week on the slopes at Aspen or on the beach at Antigua. I’m diligent about this, and think I do a reasonably good job. But let me tell you, it’s hard work.
In any case, once I got to graduate school I was able to convert summer into a valuable piece of real estate for Getting Shit Done. It was a key stretch of time for things like preparing for orals and dissertating. (That, and finding a wife and getting married.) In the time since, much of the writing of my books took place during summer.
But the pipeline wasn’t always steady. I remember the summer of 2012 fondly because I had four projects going simultaneously and recall one happy evening in particular when I wrote the introduction to an anthology at a closed snack bar while my kids practiced with the swim team at our town pool. (Family trips were to places like Gettysburg, Saratoga, and Jamestown.) But other years, like 2009, 2017, and 2022 were tough because I was casting about without a clear sense of direction.
This is one of those years. The shadows loom larger now because the specter of finitude—talent, health, time itself—hovers over all my days. Besides my mortal limits there is the fact that the world undergoes its fixed imperative of changing, whether as a matter of intellectual fashion or technological innovation. Figuring out how to retire appropriately will be one more task I’m going to try and approach systematically. We’ll see if I can pull it off with something resembling grace.