The Summer-Long Day

A post on Midsummer isolation and 'The Wife's Lament', which is a shortened version of something I originally posted on Patreon.

Wistful Whitsun

Just sharing this piece, rather belatedly, at what would once have been the tail-end of Whitsuntide.

It doesn’t feel natural to go on living indefinitely in unmarked time, without holiday or festival. Normal cycles of work and leisure have been disrupted by this crisis: some people are working harder than ever, under impossible stress, while others have found themselves unemployed or on uneasy furlough, with time on their hands that can’t be enjoyed as carefree holiday.

Months of monotony, with nothing to look forward to and nothing to distinguish one day from another, is an experience which fundamentally conflicts with most of the ways societies throughout history have found to give structure to the passage of time. Most religions recognise the importance of marking time: celebrating rites of passage, appointing seasons for feasting and fasting, getting together at set times to celebrate, pray, or mourn. As religious holidays die away, secular society invents its own alternatives.

Over the past few months, we’ve been stripped of all that. Those keeping Easter, Passover, Ramadan or other commemorations have had to do so at home and online, for many a very imperfect substitute, and non-believers have lost their rituals too: no birthday parties, no graduations, not even the weekly trip to a favourite coffee shop. We’ve been deprived of almost every conceivable form of public, shared experience — perhaps most painfully of all, with restrictions on funerals, the rituals of grieving. These are anchors, and without them we drift.

It’s hard to assess the cumulative effect of all those missed rituals, all those cancelled joys, and the voids where memories should have been. The impact of their loss is intangible compared to the more obvious effects of this crisis, but perhaps we should acknowledge that this, too, brings a kind of grief — for the lonely funeral, the milestone birthdays that won’t come again, or just the ever-lurking recollection of what we would have been doing now, if…