Summer

The Spring term has officially gasped its last. High time, too: it had been languishing in the IC ward for over a month, but nobody, neither the students nor the professors nor the college president, had the discipline to pull the plug. Time, fortunately, keeps a clear head about these things: it announced the end with clipped indifference. As it switched on the summer sun, students and professors scattered like roaches, turning what had been a horrible tangle of legs and mandibles into a hermetic expanse of green lawns, shaded walkways, and distant mowers. A ghostcampus.

Open summers are a gift. Waiting for them to arrive is a process that every kid in America recognizes as a test of patience, without quite knowing why, or by whom, the test is administered. And although the experiential content of Summer changes as we get older, evolving from days at the lake with Granny, to drinking beer and getting laid, to frenetic attempts to produce new and viable research, the basic, psychological implication remains the same: summer is a temple of refuge, the one place we can arrest our Orestian flight and not worry, at least for a moment, about the furies of the Everyday.

Perhaps no one is as conscious of this sense of reprieve as university professors. After all, who else has such long-standing experience? As the student scurry off, to their backpacking tours, their internships, their jobs in the family bakery, the professors scurry too, each to his own booky burrow. The first week is spent taking stock, forming projects, gathering energy: recovering from the soul-searing work of sitting-in-judgment. Soon thoughts turn to the judgment that will be passed on their own work, both by posterity (the real judge) and the tenure committee (sham court). Even in this first flush of reprieve, the Professor is forced to remember that the three months of unstructured time ahead come with a ticking clock.

I rail against this life, but I also love it. Its rhythms are semi-circadian, with cycles a touch too long and patterns a touch too irregular: it is an amplitude damping within a phase modulation, an oscillation that ebbs into some great flat continuum lying at the level of the Species. The annual summer twitters are an important (and lovely) part of the job, but they are shadowed by the multi-year chunks that always threaten Catastrophe (the Degree, the Position, the Product, the Promotion.) Like most professions, it can be both ennobling and eviscerating, luminous and petty. It taps wonderfully into cycles of seasonal growth, but hamstrings them with long term forecasts and the burden of an integrated life. Even now, at the beginning of what is shaping up to be a beautiful summer of family reunions in the mountains, countless research ambitions, wild schemes of going camping with Benjamin, and a raging social calendar at the dome, I am acutely conscious that those wonderful, boyish days spent pissing away time by the bucketful are a thing of the unrecoverable past.