Bookends: August '25

When sentimentality can be a gift

I find that as each year passes, a particular season or month will remain more vibrant in my mind than the others. These are periods of time when life is generous in all of its facets: my mind is uncluttered and unbothered, schedules are unhindered, and seasonal pastimes are savored fully. As I think on 2024, summer crystalizes and surfaces: clear, cool freshwater, little green herons hunchbacked and humorous, and the tang of Cane’s sauce on greasy chicken fingers. I carry these emblems with me into the present year, anticipating their repetition.

But just as these morsels in time could never be expected as if they are owed to us, they also cannot be conjured. Year after year I sulk into disappointment as a current season is not quite saturated as its memory. But then the next season curls around the corner, sneaky and eager to surprise.

There are times when sentimentality can be a form of discontent, distracting you from the present and its unique offerings. But nostalgia, when tempered, can open the way for us to delight in life’s abundance. Here, we recollect and relive but also experience freshly. And so I find myself reveling anew in school buses, prematurely fallen leaves, late summer rainstorms, and ever other cliched nostalgia of back-to-school season. I am in first grade, a sophomore in high school, and a first-year seminarian. I bubble up with gratitude for all of it: for the way memory can be kind in sifting out the best of times, but also for these windows of enchantment, when all is just so.

Books

• On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf (1926)

Nonfiction / Essays

• The Iliad by Homer (801)

Classics / Epic Poetry

• Esio Trot by Roald Dahl (1990)

Juvenile

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)

Literary Fiction

Albums

• Song for our Daughter by Laura Marling (2020)

• And, to soak even more in the nostalgia of early fall: