Summer's close
"Why cling to summer," a friend said the other day. "It is over." The question took me by surprise, though it shouldn't have, given that we are in mid-September. However, in Egypt summer lingers on until mid-November and sometimes even later. It is still scorching hot during the day. The evenings, though, are beautiful and balmy. Still, there are tell-tale signs that the summer is over: everyone has returned from the seaside resorts, youngsters have gone back to school, the days are shorter, and the evenings more lonesome.
What my friend was alluding to was that one is never as happy or unhappy as one imagines oneself to be. Thereby, making the mystery at the heart of changing seasons one of unfolding human nature as much as the natural phenomenon we take for granted.
"Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so," wrote the world's most insightful bard, Shakespeare. It is all a matter of interpretations, of perspectives. Or, is it? That is the challenging question summer conjures up.
Summer is sexy, all flash and endless abandon. For many, the season is a constant round of beach parties -- real and imagined. At its heart lies a terrible lack of urgency, and hence its allure. Summer is always young and attractive -- always riveting.
Autumn, on the other hand, is all too grown- up. It is often uncomfortable, precisely because it forces us to deal with the unsettling theme of change, and especially when the change is not necessarily viewed as for the better. The Fall, as the Americans so aptly call it, is a sober season: forget about Halloween and think of Thanksgiving. Or rather, it is an all too sobering experience. It is really more about maturing than about change.
This year, summer's close comes with a curious mix of coincidences. Back to school coincides with the onset of Ramadan -- the "holy month of fasting" for Muslims. Ramadan is the very month in which the Qur'an was first revealed to Prophet Mohamed. That is why it is so venerated. But, Ramadan is a very special month in more ways than one -- including the mundane. Fasting often followed by feasting. Almsgiving and sparing a thought for the afterlife stand in sharp contrast with the release of the most absorbing soap operas and thrilling films. At any rate, one cannot properly fast without observing prayers. Above all, Ramadan is a month in which Muslims are reminded of how prayer and piety lead to more rounded and desirable lives.
This year the sounds, smells and tastes of the Autumn would be just as important as the spectacle of Summer. Yet another strange coincidence this year is that the Coptic New Year Nawruz falls in Ramadan. What omen does that bode? I spent a whole weekend wading through these shallows. As a child, summer always ended when we returned to Cairo from a seaside resort just in time for school. Today, as a middle-aged man, I realise that Autumn is not only thrilling, but poignant -- which is where the ambiguity of Nawruz in Ramadan coinciding with Summer's close comes in.
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