Spring's Last Light

Observations.

Tomorrow is the Summer Solstice. First Day of Summer. Midsummer's Fest. Puck. Queen Mab. You know. I am all nerves. I have many things to do but run in circles accomplishing nothing. One should not run in summer, I guess, especially in the lazy old south.

I read some interesting reviews online at the New York Times this morning.

First this:

For most of us love is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary. But Cristina Nehring has a different idea. Her ardent polemic, “A Vindication of Love,” puts forward a darker, more demanding vision of love. This is not, it should be said right away, a book without ambition: the subtitle is “Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century,” though it is not exactly romance Nehring is writing about, but a more difficult, vital image of passion she believes we have lost.

Then this:

It is a sobering fact that, according to Bernstein, until the mid-19th century, “most of the world still subscribed to what I have been calling the harem culture, and in only the few countries of the West, the small peninsular domain of Christendom, did a different attitude prevail.” He describes the harem attitude as “both more realistic about male sexual desire than the Western culture of chastity and monogamy and less sentimental about it.” Bernstein’s harem mirrors the Darwinian male mind, which is sexually programmed for youth, beauty, variety and a great deal of it, “a place of limitless erotic possibility” where lust and pity party.

Already your mind is wandering from this dry — unless you just spilled your coffee — flat page to a smoky room filled with the potent scent of sandalwood and hashish, where exotic young women with veils on their limbs and bells on their ankles dance languidly (sans pole) as you recline on a red brocade divan bulging with pillows, while another beautiful, silky-haired girl. . . . But wait, before you take that final plunge (or puff) that brings perfect wisdom and contentment, come back! We must first consider the political, social, economic (the old “he has the money, she doesn’t” routine) and feminist (ditto but with outrage) implications of the intoxicating collision between Caucasian heterosexual men and, well, any lovely young thing who is not of their own ethnic or cultural heritage. It is here that Bernstein comes to our aid with his accessible, much-researched and far-reaching book — though his subject is so complex that he provides only a bare introduction, a kind of hybrid of history, interview and anecdote.

Then this:

Mr. Allen’s unwavering belief in an empty cosmos made somewhat less bleak by the charms of old movies, older music and much younger women is one of the few things left we can count on. If the man ever gets religion, then we will know we’re really in trouble.

And I read some other things, too, including some of the big photoblogs where people write in the colder, knowing tones. Then I went back and commented on some of the things I read. Then I wondered what was wrong with me, wondered why I wanted to go picking fights. Then I remembered that Midsummer was approaching.

I will leave it to those of you who read this blog on a semi-regular basis to make all the connections. You know what I mean. I'm too rattled to do so right now. In writing, that is. I already know the connections.