While running this morning, I detected, in the incipient coolness of the air, one of the first hints of fall coming to the Washington, D.C., area. This period of transition from summer to fall incites all manner of wistfulness and nostalgia in me. I’ve yet to shake its childhood associations, its aura of terminality combined with its invitation to new possibilities. In 2020, I described it in this way:
August might be the first experience children have of the end times.
How else to explain the brutal finality that cuts short the freedom of summer, when seemingly endless days are filled with wonderfully aimless pleasures: trips to the neighborhood pool, romps through the woods, games with friends, neighbors (often one and the same)? The sun sets kindly on such days, and night invites its own joys: more games (with the added thrill of darkness), bonfires, marshmallow smores, all set to a soundtrack of chirping insects. For a while, it seems like it could last forever; days seem to pass in a haze of timeless bliss.
But the end comes slowly, then suddenly. First, the back-to-school ads, creeping onto television and the radio. Then the looming presence of summer work for school, perhaps long put off. And finally, unfairly, unjustly, school itself draws near. When it becomes easy to start counting the days before classes begin, summer is already over. Try as they might to stretch out what time remains, there’s nothing children can do to make summer last forever.
This is the time of year we find ourselves in now. And while perhaps the world has changed since my own childhood (one not all might have shared), and undoubtedly the world is quite different now than it was just a year ago, I imagine even the children facing a return to some kind of school are beginning to sense summer’s end. It is a strange time, even for those of us who no longer really get a summer at all. For us, it retains emotional power in part due to the way the academic calendar shapes the world around it — and in part due to the way our childhoods imprint themselves in our memories and on our psyches. For us — or at least for me — this time keeps a kind of twilight evanescence, at once recalling its origin in the past and forcing the contemplation of what things will themselves fade into memory as each summer did then and as all of them have now.
“The resultant heady mix of nostalgia and sentiment is hard to convey properly,” I continued. But one work of music managed to do so almost perfectly: Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs. I have a strange habit of listening to certain music only when its “vibe” seems most fitting for me. The Suburbs is a highly evocative reverie of bygone days, disbelief that those moments are gone now, and discontent with the trappings of modernity. It’s all backed by the band’s trademark virtuosity and heart-on-your-sleeve emotionality. If that weren’t enough to prove its perfection for this time of year, consider that it was originally released in August. It’s almost as if the band’s members sensed that the album would be a perfect soundtrack for this wistful period. So give it a listen, while the time is still right, and autumn’s chill still comes only in hints.