Winslow Homer’s “Summer Night” (1890), oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Each summer, I dream of spending part of it by the sea as I did as a child. Never happens. Maybe summer disappoints, because we expect too much of it.
Winter, it is generally agreed, is the harshest season. But summer may be the cruelest. It offers its promises with soft, welcoming arms only to snatch them away.
Read MoreThis has been a fabulous season for hair.
Let me clarify – not actual hair, which summer wreaks havoc on, turning fine locks limp and coarse tresses frizzy. No, despite its Donner Party-quality snowstorms, winter remains hair’s best season – low humidity, don’t you know.
But this is proving to be the summer of metaphoric hair. First, we have one of the great hair performers in history – Donald Trump, who accepted the nomination for president of the United States Thursday at a Republican National Convention that was by turns angry, hate-filled, surreal and meh. Then The New York Times – which often covers the city as if it were a foreign country – expressed surprise at some men here spending $800 on a haircut. The article was accompanied by a photograph of Roger Federer, whose stylists include Tim Rogers of Sally Hershberger’s downtown studio. ...
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I’ve always hated winter, but for a long time I made my peace with it by rereading the middle section of John Knowles’ “A Separate Peace,” a novel that was in a sense the inspiration for my forthcoming novel, “Water Music.” Indeed, Knowles’ novel has had such an effect on me that although I haven’t reread it in years, I think of it often when I pass the local high school athletic fields but especially in winter when the fields are blanketed by snow.
“A Separate Peace” is very much a story about the games men play, or rather, the games boys play, in this case a group of Devon School (i.e. Phillips Exeter Academy) students, at loose ends during the summer of 1942. The story is bracketed by that summer and the one that follows. But its heart is the winter in-between, a winter that will both insulate the boys from the war that is taking a terrible toll around the world and isolate the rivalries and jealousies that are at the heart of all wars.
Phineas – Finny to his friends – is the charismatic athlete around whom the story and the boys’ extracurricular life revolve. Gene is the introverted, intellectual best friend who admires Finny’s intangibles – until he feels that they are striking at the heart of his own identity. Read more
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