Summer. Weeks when we had the office and the campus to ourselves. When we took up tennis, inspired by Sharapova. When we worked night and day. When we walked in the Lakes and North Yorkshire, and visited festivals and conferences. Weeks of discounted salads at Boots. Of snacks in the office. Of foccacia and guacamole. Of rice crackers and salsa. Of Ikea furniture and potted shrubs for the yard.
Soon R.M. leaves permanently for a life faraway, outside academia (though she hasn’t finished her dissertation quite yet) and for me the new academic year begins, the descent into winter and short days, the audit and the pass-the-beanbag learn-how-to-teach course. Summer is ending and it is as though a great epoch has come to a close. Or that everything which came to an end in my life ends once again as the door into summer closes behind me.
When I was twenty, I told R.M. as we crossed the field on the way back to my flat, I loved the intervals between work, time reading long novels or wandering streets, times of journeying (leaving and departing) – time to dream because my life had not found its course. And now? The channel has been cut and the river moves swiftly. There is no time, and time between is a haunted time, no longer open, drifting air, but a frightening expanse. The correspondences I used to keep by letter are ending, or have come to an end. Is there time? No time for that great giving of time to which reading and writing belong. There is only work-time, only today and tomorrow.
Lars Iyer's Blog 