In my 190-plus posts for this blog, I’ve only once thought to sing the praises of A.Word.A.Day, Anu Garg’s brilliant daily email blast. Allow me a second huzzah: A.Word.A.Day is, most mornings, the Inbox guest I’m happiest to see. An entry from earlier this week particularly caught my attention: estivate (verb), “to pass the summer in a dormant state.” Finally, a way to describe what I’ve been doing these past months! I haven’t just been reading about Trump’s blunders and icing my back. I’ve been estivating!
But for me (and for the readers of this blog who are teachers or students), the period of estivation is over. Fall classes start soon; meetings are being scheduled; rec-letter requests are coming in. No more reading purely for pleasure! It’s time to get a head start on the syllabus. (What moron assigned all these books? Oh, I did.) No more Olympics! No more obsessive scanning of the news! I’m reluctant to tally how much of the summer I’ve sacrificed to the coming election—but, what the hell, let’s call it two hours a day, and then multiply that by 120. Almost 250 hours! Time I could have devoted to my kids! Trump’s not just a con artist; he’s a thief. And time is his currency.
One thing I’m looking forward to, as the semester approaches: teaching Geoffrey Brock’s new translation of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. I’ve written about Six Memos a number of times for this blog, so I won’t describe the work once again. (Nicholas Lezard has an admiring review just up on The Guardian’s website that calls the collection “one of the most unusual books of literary criticism ever written.”) But I will say I’m eager to pair Calvino’s lectures on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity with works by Shakespeare, Dickinson, Milan Kundera, James Baldwin, and Tony Kushner that embody those literary qualities, and I’m especially eager to see what additional qualities my students advocate for in their own Sixth Memos.
But really, who knows how the fall will go. Back in April, taking stock of my 49th year, I mapped out something I called “Project 50”: a way to get ready for the milestone ahead. I listed a series of predictable midlife goals (predictable, at least, for my doing-all-right-but-could-be-doing-better self): lose a few pounds, get more sleep, swim, stretch, play tennis. I even set the whole thing up as a repeating daily event on my iCal. Three days later, I popped a disc. As the Yiddish proverb goes: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
In 1984, Calvino was invited by Harvard to give six talks for the following year’s Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures. He finished five of them by September of 1985, and then, before his scheduled flight to the U.S., he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. “I found the typescript on his desk,” his widow Esther Calvino writes, “in perfect order, each individual talk in its own transparent folder, ready to be placed in his suitcase.”
