Summer’s Flit

While living in Brabant, in the south of the Netherlands, in 1884, Vincent van Gogh, wrote to his younger brother Theo, about how he perceived the seasons in colours, and described summer as ‘the opposition of blues against an element of orange in the golden bronze of the wheat’.

Summer Evening (June 1888) by Van Gogh

Van Gogh thought of summer to have a deep-seated symbolic meaning. His fascination with summer continued even years later when he moved to Provence and, thoroughly under the spell of the harvest of the wheat, produced several works that captured the essence of summer days in southern France.                  

If spring is the season of new beginning and regeneration, summer is the period of youth - the time of romance, fullness, growth, and limitless potential - something well portrayed by Mark Twain in his Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer stories (it is the summer when Tom helps Huck, who finds his ‘civlised’ life confining, escape and explore the world outside).

In the poem Insect Life of Florida, Lynda Hull mulls over how the hot summer days appear to be endless and how the rains on hot days make her transiently forget the cruelty of love:         

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,

My parents silent for hours. Even then I knew

Something of love was cruel, was distant.    

Summer Evening (1947) by Edward Hopper

While it is scientifically not known whether the notion of ‘summer love’ is really real or it has just become a part of our collective consciousness, at least art and literature love hot, long summers, as evident in scores of films, songs, paintings, novels, and poems. Even Shakespeare, the ‘Bard of Avon’, was no stranger to the importance of summer as the season of the forcefulness of the passions:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.  

Cloudless sky, sunny days, creeks and streams flowing in their fullness, roadsides kneaded in grass, trees laden with leaf, poppies, and goldfinches, sparrows, and robins squeaking and squawking: the fulsomeness of life is more vivid in summer than any other season.         

But if there is flowering, sweetening, and ripening, as the summer ends, there is also putrefaction. Autumn takes a light-footed leap, wiping out all symptoms of summer, which it now looks like was the evanescent mist that hung over a tree on which hope and love lived in unison.

The end of a season is like the irreversible course of growing up.

To the Lighthouse

A lighthouse is a mystical place. Lighthouses are among the most striking and captivating historical buildings we have. They represent a range of emotions and ideas: beauty, isolation, romance, danger, security, fear, home, sacrifice. Lighthouse stories characterise some of the classic themes used by storytellers since centuries.

Mukilteo Lighthouse Park, Washington state

Why do lighthouses move our romantic core? Tall, unsmiling towers are reassuring as they are there to help mariners in treacherous waters reach a safe harbour. A tower holds dual symbolism: on the one hand, it’s mighty, phallic, and erect, denoting strength. On the other hand, it is feminine - suggestive of an enclosed space, a fenced sanctuary, and a safe haven.   

Philosophically, a lighthouse symbolises individual consciousness.  It’s like ‘a light in the darkness of mere being’, in the words of legendary psychiatrist Carl Jung. Lighthouses remind us of the link we all have to each other, and show us how we can aid each other in a time of urgency.

‘Lighthouses may have come to be seen as brilliant beacons but they are also cenotaphs, marking deathtraps that for centuries devoured mariners along the continent’s coasts,’ wrote Nathaniel Rich, an American novelist and essayist, in a 2016 article in the New York Review of Books.     

A ferry departing the Mukilteo Light on the Puget Sound

Technological advancement means lighthouses are not rather as important for sea navigation as they were in the past. (However, the US Coast Guard still considers lighthouses aids to navigation. According to an estimate, up to seventy per cent of the United States' 800 or so lighthouses are still operational today.) There is still something about lighthouses that inspires both fascination and awe.

Even though we have been slowly extinguishing our lighthouses, and most of which are seldom operational these days, they remain culturally and symbolically commanding, and retain a strong hold on our imagination.

A Better World?

Sometimes we feel as if there is no end to the big global challenges that we face. Income inequality, epidemics, carbon emissions, air pollution, large population lacking clear water, xenophobia, gender inequality, human rights violations, economic migration, refugee crisis, terrorism, nuclear weapons, unemployment, social unrest, autocratic leaders – and the list goes on.

YouGov, a global public opinion and data company, in 2015 conducted and published a survey, asking participants ‘All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?’ The results were unsurprisingly depressing. In the UK, only four per cent thought things are getting better, and in the US, the figure was only six per cent. Even in Australia and Germany, two among the world’s most peaceful countries, only three per cent and four per cent, respectively, thought the world was getting better. Hardly anyone thinks that things are getting better.  

Better Tomorrow by Yuumei

On the other hand, we see indications of hope, optimism, and positivity. The number of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has considerably decreased since the nineteen-fifties. Majority of people are literate, homicides and war deaths have decreased, life expectancy has risen, democracy is flourishing in more countries today, and more countries today are contributing to global growth, with several nations transitioning to middle-income status.   

Assessing the situation of the world is harder than it sounds. Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard University, in his book Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, argues that the world is, in fact, getting better and better. If not in every way, things are getting better in many ways that we often overlook.

The power of bad news is monstrous. Memory is selective. We remember bad incidents more than we remember good ones. Likewise, negative news receives more attention from us than positive news do. It is easy to be pessimistic about the world and to think that nothing is getting better. Following daily news is not a parameter to ascertain how the world is changing. Progress, our most important product, is a slow process that seldom makes the headline.

If the empirical evidence is to be believed, on almost all of the dimensions of material well-being -health, literacy, poverty, human rights, and freedom - the world at present is a better place than it was a century or even fifty years ago. The need is to communicate to the widest audience possible that technical, political, and socio-economical efforts are in fact yielding a very positive impact.