time is not a school, just a burning
Here’s one. Vogue, May 1963, pages 116-7. On the verso page, a photograph taken by Art Kane at the Antigua Beach Hotel. A model in a Sacony bathing suit languishes against a horse on a beach. Dusk or dawn, perhaps? The sky looks gray but there are no shadows. It doesn’t matter. All black and white photographs of the beach in summer are of the same beach, a nowhere inlet on some faraway moon. Nothing quite as it should be. Water like collodion, air like static. Heat like a secret, like skin. All things dim or glowing as if newly born in fire or just about to burn.
The caption is peak sloganeering: “SALT WATER PLEATS ON THE AZURE WEATHER-TRACK,” along with a column of similar text, pleasure-textured words laid out not to signify but to titillate.1 Higher up on the page, “AMERICAN SUMMER BY JOAN DIDION,” all caps, kicks off a pretty, two-page piece by the young writer, more elevated ad copy than essay. “It is the summers of our middle childhood that we remember with an almost impossible clarity,” she begins. Also peak sloganeering: childhood that we remember, prompting words for nostalgia’s mass hypnosis.
At the time, it made sense for Didion to declare summer “the season of escape: the landscape in which to contemplate, alone, our failures and our possibilities; the safety valve, the frontier that none of us wants—or can afford—to see closed.” She was in her late twenties, had worked at Vogue since winning the magazine’s Prix de Paris in 1956, and had just published her first novel. President Kennedy’s skull was still intact, and would be for another six months. The “middle childhood” she claims to recall with such clarity was the mid-to-late-40s, the dawn of American hegemony. Almost impossible clarity—that’s not a memory. That was the whole idea.
There was plenty going on in America during the summer of ’63 to cloud the clarity of such myths, but Didion strives toward timelessness here, adorning young adulthood with stray bits of poetry and a breezy, first-person-plural: “We remember the mauve twilight wastes of Park Avenue”; “We remember time wasted (wasted? spent) on the Eastern Shore of Maryland;” and so on. It sounds less like the voice of a generation than the president of a rotary club at an annual meeting.
Indeed, appeals to timelessness tend to be the first and fastest things to age. While Didion’s white, leisure-classed we looked upon summer as a much-needed last frontier, a more urgent metaphor would go booming down the country’s capital that very August: “This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.” And later: “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” Whether the summer shimmers or swelters depends as much on your turn of phrase as on the color of your skin. Escape, it turns out, is a luxury. The juxtaposition, unfair as it is, does Didion no favors: “For a few priceless weeks, we can be—if we work at it—free[.]”
—
Amid all the easy sentimentalism, Didion does have an argument: that memories are not recalled so much as kept, guarded like rare shards from childhood’s shattered mirror. She describes how her “mother would write to my father (on postcards still kept in the box with the broken shells, the translucent pressed nasturtiums, all the small stinging proofs that time is the school in which we burn)[.]” She goes on: “We do not remember summer, after all, for its organization. What we (and our children) remember later are the alone moments, the impromptu moments.” These moments include “the hot and littered airports,” “the evening fogs blowing in over Cape Cod and Cape Ann,” “drinking Dr. Pepper and Grapette” in North Carolina, and so on—a ViewMaster summer with “So many places to be alone, so many escapes.” Each roadtrip stop is gathered like another postcard for the seashell-box. Each memory a little token, each token memento mori.
The piece also seems old now for other, inevitable reasons: changes in print media conventions, quick-to-spoil ad-copy clichés, references to bygone brands like Grapette. But, perhaps touchy from this summer of disaster, I find the entire dreamy, assured paradigm equally extinct. For something with so much color and texture, it sounds hollowed-out and implausible. How might we read “we (and our children)” now, with its stern, insistent parenthetical? Such confidence in the future now feels almost gauche, a debunked certainty far from our constant invocation of future generations, those conjectural husks whose lives we won’t stop making miserable. If history quickly rendered “American Summer” trifling and tonedeaf in the ’60s, further history and heat have rendered it impossible, as remote as old photos of the last passenger pigeons, dying away in zoos.
I am not interested in offering a critique of Didion beyond the obvious fact that the piece is not indicative of her powers, and is forgettable, likely dashed off before a long vacation. (Perhaps there is something useful, though, in the fact that this dewy-eyed Didion would become the archdeacon of American disappointment.) I am interested, rather, in the way that changes in the climate cause changes in our receptiveness to language, regardless of original context or intent, distorting the very metaphors and myths that constitute even such a reliable notion as summer.
For if you were to write “American Summer” now, you could still call summer the season of escape, and describe beach-house clambakes and wide-skied picnics. But the connotation of the word tilts from abandon to abandonment. Escape not just from obligation but from harm. Escape into the sea as the cinders fall around you. Escape from the small airport as the wildfires roar your way. Escape from record ruin and bloated days. Escape into air conditioning, the ill-omened refuge of cool rooms. Whatever the summer is becoming, “safety-valve” and “frontier” are not among them.
If there is a metaphor that sticks out as apt in Didion’s piece, it is that oddly italicized line: “time is the school in which we burn.” It’s from a poem by Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day.” In it, the poet strolls through spring, haunted by mortality and impermanence, a villanelle-like refrain intruding on his thoughts:
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)
I find Schwartz’s poetry tedious—a person who hates poetry’s idea of poetry—but Didion seems fond of Schwartz.2 She would quote from the same poem, the same line, forty years on, in The Year of Magical Thinking, her book-length reflection on the sudden death of her husband. In “American Summer,” the poem is an attempt to drum up gravitas from pablum. In Magical Thinking, its sentimentalism is striking and desperate, like something sharp pulled from a box of broken shells.
—
Just as the same metaphor can be weak or strong depending on its purpose, on whether the hand of its wielder is trembling or steady, on whether its summoning comes easy or hard, whole swathes of figurative language can wither as the things they once described dry up. The paradigm that feels lost to me is not just Didion’s handful of bright notions that now seem grim: summer-as-escape or summer-as-return or summer-as-American-inheritance. It is the broader literary paradigm that goes mudlarking for mortality in the stuff of one’s own life. Didion, via Schwartz, picking up Time’s drumbeat, Et in arcadia ego, Larkin staring down his curtains in the early morning, that sort of thing.
Great artists do this well, of course, but as a habit it can grow tiring, just as Didion’s piece begins to stretch thin. The problem with constantly interrupting life with notions of Time and Death is that they are always there to summon, and anyone can do it. You can always pet the black dog at your heels. Climate change—that pale, intergovernmental phrase—seems to serve much the same function, the Schwartzian eye on the clock swiveled toward the weathervane. Just as the poet is allowed his woe at seemingly random times and seasons, the so-called doomer can gather, often legitimately, all manner of things under the heat dome of assured destruction.
But climate change does not slot into that equation, not least of all because it is manmade. Didion/Schwartz says: mortality—can’t you feel it lurking in the April day, in the pressed flowers, even in the hazy American summer? Isn’t that so sad, so profound, but also so beautiful? Climate change, on the other hand, lurks as a threat to the very existence of April, its definition, its very cultural and calendric matter. Mortality will rob you of April but not of all Aprils, the rest of Aprils. Climate change could—or if not April, then August. Unlike mortality, climate change is not cyclical but cylindric, an elliptical column whose agitation will not quiesce at such a minor fact as your own death. Our new dread over the burning world—call it “climate grief” if you must—is particular, materially determined, and not some mere metonym for ruin that our generation will seamlessly swap out for Time or Death.
What makes the two different—fear of death vs. dread of mounting heat—is that the latter makes literal what the former abstracts. In the Schwartz lines above, thoughts about ending up a memory or photo are intercut with an image of a burning schoolhouse, which grows into a blaze by the poem’s end. Reading it now, in what will likely be the hottest summer ever, I can’t help but read it in reverse, the parentheses slipping a line. The burning room—that’s the literal thing, the thing that is happening, that will happen. Conjectures about memory and photographs—to me, that’s now the metaphor, the thing that Time seems like. Some false eternity, silvery and mirrorlike.
A metaphor, after all, is not mere description but substitution, one thing for another thing; and the storehouse of language, like the earth’s, is not limitless. When things disappear or change or dwindle, what becomes of the other things they stood for? It is not hard to imagine such a language, lopped-off and too-literal, its stunted vectors uselessly pointing to the same, smoldered reality, as its unmoored notions disappear to some unreal place. A place much like the world of old magazine photographs, which requires no substitution at all, but instantiates endlessly, on its long and lunar beaches, all surface, all grief.
—
Postscript—
Of course there are still many beaches, all in full color. You can take the subway there and watch the seaplanes haul Michelob ULTRA banners across the sky. My friend Matt and I drove down in the morning on the Fourth of July. Drinking painkillers, sitting in the sun. Some neighbors walked past us without noticing. Two men tossed a frisbee, one fully naked to show off his enormous penis. I found a pair of sunglasses. Volunteers in teal shirts asked us to mind the endangered piping plovers, which were in their breeding season. Laminated copies of schoolchildren’s plover portraits flapped along the boardwalk. Some quite impressive, most wonky and comic, some with speech bubbles saying things like Save Me! Some of the drawings—I found this particularly funny—were credited to “Anonymous.” (Anonymous, age 7; Anonymous, age 11; &c.).
For hours the sky was split between bright blue and black, a mirrored shoreline in the air. From a still-sunny beach, we watched the nearby City disappear into thunderclouds, like we’d watched it turn the color of sulfur, then sard, a month before. That chlorine storm-smell on the wind. A minor version of a more ominous feeling, now familiar: luck scrambled with apprehension. Stirrings of escape. When the lightning got too close the Park Police made us take shelter and we did.
The wet sand was cool when we walked out after the rain. If Time was a burning schoolhouse, what is it now? What will it be when the burning’s done? Of course we didn’t know it then. Calmly we walk, &c., &c. It was the hottest day in the recorded history of time.
ben tapeworm
1 Didion also wrote photo captions for Vogue, from at least 1965 to 1978. It’s tempting to assign this one to her, but it does seem below her level of style (e.g., “horses will get you around nicely”). See Brian Dillon’s essay on the matter his book, Suppose a Sentence.
2 Didion’s memory-collecting could be summed up in one of Schwartz’s lines: “May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day.”