Finistère, France

A short non-fiction from a past summer

“People are best able to change their ways when they find two things at once in nature: something to fear, a threat they must avoid, and also something to love, a quality… which they can do their best to honour. Either impulse can stay the human hand, but the first stops it just short of being burnt or broken. The second keeps the hand poised, extended in greeting or in an offer of peace. This gesture is the beginning of collaboration, among people but beyond us, in building our next home.” — After Nature, W. G. Sebald

A few nights ago the summer had its solstice and I spent the smallest hours dreaming of stars, large blankets of them made from the velveteen blue-black sweep of what I imagine space-time to feel like. Too tired to know what 5 a.m. should have looked like, or to engage with the mystical promises of pagans, the day took on a peculiar shape, and I wonder now whether I should have been paying more attention on the longest day of the year.

Mid-morning I felt an overwhelming desire to do very little, and so planted myself in the garden with a book and three coiled up liquorice wheels, as black and shiny as the beetles that then proceeded to bother me as I sat on the ground in sun—unfortunately I could not eat those away in the same manner as the liquorice.