The Wit's Guide to Summer
Or, suffering and liking it
If you heard that summer is a vibe, you misheard.
“Summer is a verb,” Lisa Birnbach clarifies in The Official Preppy Handbook, the semi-satirical 1980s guide to WASPs and their nests. “To summer (in plain language, to spend the summer) some place other than where you live and work the rest of the year is key, and to summer in the right sort of place is crucial.”
Given the constraints posed by a lack of intergenerational wealth, this sort of place may exist primarily in your imagination. Which is fine! Summer is a passive verb, something bound to happen to anyone who manages to acquire a hammock, a cold drink, and a seasonally appropriate book.
“This summer, one-third of the nation will be ill-housed, ill-nourished, and ill-clad. Only they call it vacation.”
― Eugene P. Bertin
The right sort of book is the right sort of place. Sag Harbor is both a village on Long Island and a 2009 coming-of-age novel by Colson Whitehead, and you can be summered in both at the same time. When you go to Sag Harbor in 1985, people pepper you with the same three questions: When did you get out? How long are you out for? Who else is out? The goal is to stay out just long enough to become someone else.
“In idle moments, I retreated into that early-summer dream of reinvention, when you set your eyes on September and that refurbished self you were going to tool around in, honking the horn so people would take notice.”
― Colson Whitehead
But maybe don’t actually assume another person’s identity. That’s wrong, except when Tom Ripley does it in The Talented Mr. Ripley. For that particular psychopath, summering is a hyperactive verb. Just think of him crawling around the floor of his hotel room in the French Riviera, “following the patches of sunlight that came through his windows, so that he wouldn’t look so white the next time he came down to the beach.”
“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”
― Russell Baker
If you can’t get out of the city or your self, celebrate being in it. Marlowe Granados’ 2020 novel Happy Hour begins with heroines Isa and Gala landing in Newark on May 17 and ends when the cool weather arrives on September 7. In between, they search New York City for glamour and dispense aphorisms. “It takes practice to have restraint,” Isa writes, “and we are not yet at an age to try it out.”
“Summer is the only season where you can smell the outside on people.”
― Marlowe Granados
The perfection of summer as a metaphor is that just when it begins, it starts to end. As of yesterday, the days are getting shorter. Nothing beautiful lasts, but neither do mosquito bites. Lyme disease does, though. Still! Summer!
“The summer and the country have no charms for me. I look forward anxiously to the return of bad weather, coal fires, and good society in a crowded city.”
― Sydney Smith
Riposte Cards on the move
There is a high probability that the letter carriers who will be bringing Riposte Card No. 4 to my 30 beloved paying subscribers this week will be wearing shorts. And good for them! You too can be visited by a beshorted civil servant carrying a complete collection of Riposte Cards if you subscribe today!
Quote Vote
“Staying in town during the summer is a sin worse than pederasty and sheep-buggering.”
— Anton Chekhov
OK, let’s move on to some active summer verbs before I’m tempted to make a joke about Chekhov’s sheep.
Get Wit Quick No. 206 was written next to an open window, at least. Regular readers will have noticed the dad jokes contained in GWQ No. 102 were upcycled into my treatise on the subject in last weekend’s Globe and Mail because my gag reflex means I can’t keep a bad joke down. My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is further proof of this. Slap the❤️ below as though you just spotted a mosquito.
Summertime is itchy time.
— Ogden Nash
Nice reference to the offish Preppy Handbook!