Loving the Lethargy of Summer

It's a season of slow. There's something surreal about Washington in the summer, as bodies and minds broil and watch and wait.

Sessile. Suspended. Maybe stuck somewhere in the humidity. Anticipation. Something's going to happen. Someone's going to care.

Even though there's a national election being run out of downtown D.C., everybody here knows that the business of the nation is taking place elsewhere: The coast of Long Island. The Georgia Dome. The congressional districts where first-term Republicans battle to save the revolution and their seats.

In Washington, we wonder about welfare and wait. Detached and impuissant.

A 13-hour FDA hearing on Ru-486, the "abortion pill," had the controversy dullified right out of it, despite some questionable queries and shady studies upon which the recommendation was based. A Los Angeles Times reporter commented somewhere around hour eight that she was "mired in the depths of journalistic hell." In other words, she was bored.

And it's not that life here is boring, exactly. But if Washington was a person and the country was a street, the capital city would be arrested for loitering.

So far this summer, the only thing that's really engaged off-hours attention has been the Joe Klein/Anonymous discord, and that's only because there's not enough passive political gossip to fuel even the most curious of wonks.

For those who missed it, Newsweek political columnist Klein was outed last week as being the anonymous author of Primary Colors. No big deal except that he had explicitly and vehemently denied his authorship not just to the public but to his journalistic colleagues, ho ended up speculating, in print, about alternate primary suspects.

"Can you believe Joe Klein lied?"

"Yes, wouldn't you?"

"I never thought he wrote that well."

"That's because he disses your boss."

The extent to which the "who is this unmasked man?!" debate has occupied the minds and chatter of Beltway barhoppers is stunning. More than it underscores the mental lethargy of Washingtonians as they steam like dumplings outside (maybe losing brain power along with water weight), it suggests a disengagement in politics by even political operatives.

I have yet to hear:

"Can you believe they're really going to hold up Kennedy-Kassenbaum because of MSAs?"

"Well, I heard they might compromise and plan for a long-term experiment to see what the effect would be on group health insurance."

"Don't you think it's obvious that Medical Savings Accounts would draw all of the healthy and wealthy people into alternate plans and leave everybody else in drastically expensive plans for sick, poor people?"

"No."

The fact is that there are serious things going on that people here know about, I dare say care about, but don't have the energy to talk about. We absorb summer stillness from the air directly into ourselves and manage to address what most people consider "reality" only in the future tense, imagining that hazy far-off time when our mind vacations are a memory.

There's something about the summer that robs the everyday of its gravity. It seems wrong not to linger over lemonade, not to spend weekends wandering towards the beach, or Sundays bringing back sand and sunburns and almost somber senselessness.

I never spent a summer at Harvard while I was actually a student there, but once I experienced Cambridge in the sunshine. Before my senior year of high school, I spent eight weeks living in Stoughton Hall and writing plays and absorbing an aspect of Harvard I wouldn't be exposed to again until Commencement, five years later.

Granted, since I wasn't a "real" student, I was inevitably going to be shielded from lots of grimness I would later find. And there were moments of atmospheric appreciation at other times while I was an undergraduate: Lowell House's small courtyard, accessorized with snow and red mittens, is perhaps my favorite visual image, along with the sight of the blue bell tower from the river (not a wholly ocular confrontation, I confess--this sight was always accompanied by some narration like "Hey, I know somebody who lives there.").

Nonetheless, the bulk of my best Harvard memories are from that one summer. They are visceral reactions more than memories. Instinctively, I imagine the Yard, hot and still except for dogs and frisbees, when I try to think of school and calm at the same time. Nothing was serious. It was too bright for that.

My friends and I were passionate about our playtime, not enough to use it well but enough to know that it should pass undisturbed. For me, that summer was idle, neither camp nor school. It was just...summer. The way kids' summers are supposed to be but hardly ever are anymore.

Then the mental stagnation made sense. No one really had much else to do except be hot in a dorm room and be glad senior year, with all its seriousness, hadn't quite arrived.

I loved that time, and reminding myself of it made me feel optimistic through 39 feet of gray slush four months a year. Recalling it made me stifle instinctive laughter when people who never had to wander in the winter would laud Harvard's beauty.

The sedate, always beach-like feeling of being baked is a summer staple. Floating through air that's almost thick enough to hold you is, to be truthful, something of a fine feeling.

I'm glad I have this summer of slow. Maybe evoking the vague vitality of these days will get me through my next tour of duty, an indefinite stay here. I'm excited for the time when the Washington World starts to move again. But I'm not too sad that summer in this swamp will linger well past the time Cambridge is crisp and cognizant again.

Tara H. Arden-Smith '96 was executive editor of The Crimson. She moved to Washington to write for The New Republic.