Phenomenology of summer blues, a universal and very serious feeling
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summer with Ester
The happiness we lack is what we imagined, we don't know what it should look like and it can't be found in the shops. Summertime sadness is called
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July lasts a hundred years. The season of departures approaches, but like every year, it arrives too late. There's still time to die in the city, to succumb to video meetings. What have you been up to all these years? Video meetings. It's the period when Natalia Ginzburg's quote reappears online in the form of an Instagram postcard, the same unfortunate fate of half of Pavia, now traveling through stories with fragments of bored summer life. This is what books are all about, quotes stolen from who knows where, meant to serve as collective diagnoses. But maybe that's what books are all about; now that I think about it, they're not betraying anyone. So here's the postcard that's trending these past two weeks, we were saying, Natalia Ginzburg: "Everyone's leaving and asking us if we're leaving too. It's impossible to answer when we're among those who don't want to leave or stay."
Ah, beautiful, yes, yes, but it's misappropriation. Here we are posting from another era, the soft 2000s, the fat era, where the problem is generic anxiety, the lack of happiness is our greatest concern. The happiness we lack is the one we've imagined; we don't even know exactly what it should look like, and it's not available in regular stores . Therefore, lacking concrete and practical sadness, we invent some to be sad when needed. These days, the catalog offers holiday blues. Summertime sadness, it's called. It's a serious thing, even the Financial Times wrote about it.
It's when the lives of others, those who live better, become unbearable. It's a feeling opposite and symmetrical to the village Saturday, which is instead that cheerful flavor, the sense of beauty that comes over you when the package (the vacation) is still unwrapped. Wouldn't this be the best thing in life, waiting, or not? So, does this illness exist? What is it? How is it treated? Who can cure it, this holiday blues? Is there a doctor in the room? Among the SuperProust miners of feelings, Flaiano is unbeatable. If you're one of those very delicate spirits, you're already familiar with this unexpected seasonal ache, largely due to the problem of having oversized sensitivity. "Traveling is like keeping the taps running and watching time slip away, wasted, liquid, unmanageable ." If you have that kind of problem, diagnosis and treatment are in the Diary of Errors. If you really have to go on vacation and it hurts your heart, bring your work with you. Boredom and melancholy await wherever you go for fun, for a change. Tourism, a sad invention. There is no health outside your own cave. Stay still; or move for work, working.
The problem here isn't the bitter summer . It's not that we don't want to leave, it's that we wish we'd already left in June. It's that one should be the best version of oneself to enjoy the vacation, and instead it's the sleep-deprived version . It's that there's a world to see out there, and tour cities, countries, and continents, climb mountains, see the animals of Africa, sleep in tents and hear the lions roar, and instead two weeks at the Sabino beach. It's that we should rest, put our heads on ice after a year of working like crazy, swim in the sea, the Mediterranean Sea without the murky waves that come as soon as you leave Italy. And instead four planes because your friends have to open their minds and travel, see the mountains of Colombia—but was it necessary to see the mountains of Colombia? To me, they seem exactly like ours.
It's just that summer is June and July. A-gò-sto. It already sounds like a corked month. It's just that we'd like to be lively and fun to be around, but instead we'll be limp, because our best energy has been spent staying upright in a heat worthy of an atomic disaster. It's just that it was better when we were twenty; the only problem was getting a tan and going clubbing. It's just that when we were twenty, we went to sales to choose the swimsuit that looked best on us. It's just that there's no swimsuit that fits us properly. It's that we come and go because somehow life has to pass. It's an ornamental melancholy, nothing serious, since there's no place where we feel whole. We need a little bit of murderous lightheartedness to get through the summer. Let's make it happen.
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