Invincible summer

The time is ripe for escape.

But wait. It’s also our best chance for introspection and imagination.

We are fast approaching the season of both lazy days and action-packed adventures, solitude and camaraderie, novelty and nostalgia.

The irony is that for a season so iconic and instantly recognizable, marketable, loveable, it is one filled with contradictions, loaded with myriad joys and its share of grumbling as well. Not scarce are phrases like:

It’s too hot. I’m so bored. Where are my sunglasses? Football can’t come fast enough.

I have to exercise—and shave—so I can wear these shorts.

I have to wear shorts.

The Joneses are vacationing where?

My kids are driving me crazy. I miss them so much. Can someone, somewhere do something about these mosquitoes?!?

We just love to complain about summer. And when it’s over, we complain that it ended too soon.

Because in summer we’re constantly looking forward, but as we do our youth crawls back to us, winding a map of memories, of people and places, long-tethered kite string feelings and figments of imagination bending and bursting like shadows and light.

Were we those people? Did the sun strike our faces just so?

Past and present align.

Twenty years ago, actor Joe Chrest was among the founders of Swine Palace. All the King’s Men was the theatre group’s first production. Now through May 5, Chrest can be seen reprising his lead role as Jack Burden in the latest adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, published by LSU Press and loosely based on the life and career of Huey P. Long.

By the book’s end, Burden, a journalist and acolyte for Long stand-in Gov. Willie Stark, has become a man of action and learned to accept responsibility for his decisions.

“[Burden] realizes that good must come out of all that we are—the good and the bad,” Chrest told me over lunch.

It’s the same lesson Nobel Prize-winner Albert Camus learned before writing that despite facing the incredible horrors of World War II-era Europe, he had a sense of hope from the “invincible summer” abiding in his own heart. For Camus, the season symbolized undying fortitude and acceptance.

“What else can I desire than to exclude nothing and to learn how to braid with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to the breaking-point?” Camus wrote.

Like the redemptive theme of King’s or the perspective of a lauded French author, summer makes a commendable, convincing metaphor for our city. Right here and now.

In one collective sigh we curse this heat, until it is that we don’t; until that moment we chance to strip away our clothes or our calendars or the wills of others that press like irons at the flinch of our necks, and we let it take us away.

Like this intemperate oppression we harbor, Baton Rouge, too, forces us to choose. You dance with this city or you wrestle with it.

Perhaps, in season, you do your best at both. But either way, this place is firmly in your grip.

The only true misfortune is to stand at the side, obstinate and far from the floor or the ring or the pit, and watch the swift bodies of those others—their hands scraped with dirt, their brows stained with sweat—who swoon and swing and fight till they have nothing left. Empty and full.

Another contradiction.