Eternal Summer

ETERNAL SUMMER

The wanderer came to New Orleans from Cincinnati. And before that, New York City, London, and Dublin – in none of which cities could the wanderer make his home. But before all of that, there was the sunny Greek island of Lefkada. His childhood home. His infant paradise. 

Transplanted to Dublin at the age of six, he longed for the blue skies and warm breezes of his Mediterranean home. Greece became his half-remembered idyll. The cause of his restless wanderings.

In New Orleans, Hearn caught a glimpse of his lost paradise. The Germans have a word for what he was feeling. Sehnsucht. Nostalgia for the infinite. Spiritual homesickness. 

He associates this feeling with summer – the time of déjà vu  for the never-was. Homesickness for places half-forgotten. Longing for a joy not of this world. And paradises lost. 

I know it well, this summertime nostalgia. It comes with the warm air and the long summer days. Everything is bathed in gold. Then nothing else seems real. Life becomes a dream. Summers past and future  merge into the present, becoming one eternal summer, where every good thing is just about to happen.

Hearn described his childhood idyll in “Dream of a Summer Day” – a Wordworthian reminiscence of paradise, that shimmering infant memory of another world, the blue flower dream of Novalis, the gardens both real and imagined of C. S. Lewis and Hermann Hesse. 

This is his “eternal summer.” His childhood in sunny Greece. Warm and sleepy and dreamy. This is what he glimpsed when he first set eyes on New Orleans. This is the dream. The magical day. The day that never was, born of many days that were. The best days of childhood compressed into a diamond. Just the essential traits preserved. The minutiae of irrelevant things omitted. The background  shadowy and indistinct so that what remains stands in contrast. The real made ideal. 

And to live in that day timelessly so there’s only ever a little of it ahead, only so much as is pleasant. Too much would be unpleasant. Too little would lack the dynamic element of anticipation. Of that which isn’t yet but which soon will be. For it is a paradox that the dynamic exists within the static. Potentiality within actuality. The unfolding of a summer day. The moment of twilight. Of swimming through the liquid air. 

Heaven is the dream that does not fade. The bliss of pure being. The feeling of home. And to want this. And not merely this, but for there to never be anything other that this. For this to be the totality of all things, perfect and eternal.

This is the longing New Orleans evoked in the wanderer’s heart. A bit of the other world in this world. The glimpse of paradise which is worth more than a whole lifetime of earthly joy. 

Oh Lafcadio Hearn, you too were a votary of the blue flower.