Sweat

Sweat drops are concentrated little diamonds of discomfort, the physical discomfort becoming a seed crystal for all kinds of psychological discomfort. Such strange ideas emerge while working outiside in the sun. (For those who have not caught on, Canadians love to complain about the heat, something which the national character is utterly unprepared. Here ends the shameless nationalistic plug from someone who tries to respect his country while adamantly insisting on the breakdown of all borders. But please bear with this simplification.)

Escape from winter is part of our collective human memory. Winter: images of gathering around a hearth, bundling close with those close to one, hiding in a welcome enclosure, outside is a struggle, it is active and every moment you live in the cold is a small victory, there is only one defeat: death as it has come to millions who died of exposure. Cold steels the resolve, even if fruitless. Cold stokes the appetite, making food hearty and meaningful. It is hard, but in ways we can understand.

However, summer: endless bludgeoning, endless enclosures which may turn up the heat, (naturally, the air conditioner does not feature as an archetype, having been extant for a historical blink of an eye), escape from enclosures does not bring relief or struggle. The fight against heat is formless, enemyless, not at all suited for the quirks of human psychology. Summer is the death-pasture for the old. Summer is the erosive force.

There is a reason that so many literary works featuring private existential hells are set during heat waves. Camus' Etranger committed his murder in a haze. Gomez toasted endlessly to the fall of the Reich, ironically undoing himself as the streets of New York shimmered. Raskolnikov told us all how much he hated St. Petersburg in the summer. (And if Canadians find summer heat strange, imagine how much more the Russians must be puzzled.)

My apologies to all those whose lives are dictated by cycles of wet-dry, not cycles of hot-cold.

Consider: "...all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed—only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle."