The daze passed faster this summer. One scarcely noticed the mornings, for they were gone almost at once—dissolved in the clatter of trains, in the shuffle of paper, in that quiet tyranny of the desk. Is it not strange that, when I was a boy, summers seemed to swell like Homeric epics—every day a long voyage, every evening a discovery? The sky itself appeared a theater, its clouds cavorting with the grandeur of gods. Yet here, in London, the sun scarcely lingers; it peers over chimneys and sooty eaves, then vanishes, as though ashamed of our unyielding industry, as though some unseen hand pulls it back into a darker firmament where it is meant to burn for other watchers.
I ask myself: what becomes of time when one’s life is measured out not in adventures but in ledgers, not in battles fought but in hours billed? Childhood summers—those great symphonies of cricket on the lawn, salt upon the lips at Brighton, the reckless leap into rivers—stand now like marble statues in the gallery of memory: beautiful, immobile, unreachable. Yet I sometimes think they stir when I am not looking, that if I were to turn suddenly I might catch the stone boy lifting his bat again, or see the carved swimmer fling himself into some hidden tide. It is as though those lost days are not lost at all but held in suspension, guarded by presences that whisper through the branches of old trees and hover at the edges of mirrors.
London itself conspires. Its shadows are never empty. One hears laughter rising from Kensington Gardens, yes, but sometimes the laughter carries too far, echoing long after the children have gone, as though the gardens themselves remembered games played a century ago. Couples drifting along the Embankment might be lovers—or merely semblances of lovers, repeating steps from long-forgotten evenings. I, meanwhile, remain indoors, bent over figures that mock the very notion of eternity. Summer, once a sovereign, is reduced here to a whisper through an open window, the scent of plane-trees mingling with petrol fumes. Yet even the fumes at times seem touched with another world’s incense, as if the city were an altar burning sacrifices of hours and hopes to gods we no longer name.
And yet—perhaps there is consolation in this brevity, in the very swiftness of its flight. For if joy cannot be prolonged, neither can despair. Time, with all its specters, steals both alike. We who live among these narrow streets, beneath this veil of smoke, must learn to find our summers in the small intervals: a shaft of sunlight upon the Thames that seems older than the river itself, the toll of St. Paul’s at dusk sounding like a summons across centuries, the rare evening when the sky deepens to that impossible blue and, if one gazes long enough, shapes stir within it—phantoms of forgotten gods, still watching, still waiting. Though the daze passes faster, though the days diminish, still one may look up and feel, if only for a moment, that the old adventure is not wholly lost but merely transformed, half-hidden in the company of shadows.