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Dear Monstera,
Today is Summer Solstice.
Sol : Sun
Sisto : Stop
I love Summer Solstice. The longest day of the year has me thinking about time. So I want to tell you about something that happened when I was 13 years old.
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It was a hot summer day, just like today & I was at the public pool, where I have undergone many serious transformations.
I was lying on a striped beach towel, hoping to catch the lifeguard’s eye because he was handsome & older & because I thought I was already a woman.
I had a book with me because I rarely went anywhere without one.
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The book was a collection of short stories called Night in Funland1 that had a cult status among the other Goths at my school. I opened the book & started reading “The Love Letter,”2 the most talked about story among my friends. Quickly, my attention shifted from the lifeguard to Jake Belknap, the 24-year-old narrator.
Jake buys an antique desk & one night discovers it has a secret compartment. Inside the compartment, he finds a letter written long ago by Helen Elizabeth Worley.
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In the letter, Helen reveals that she is soon to be forced into an arranged marriage. Jake also learns that Helen is writing to an imaginary love. Her letter is a confessional, her way of unburdening herself.
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What happens next is the magical part of the story. Jake answers the letter, mails it, and the letter is somehow received by Helen. But that’s not it—that’s not the magical part of the story. The true magic is the night.
“The night is a strange time,” Jake says. “The night is a strange time when you're alone in it, the rest of your world asleep.”
Under the softening influence of the night, Jake begins to think of Helen as “real and alive.” He says, “And my heart went out to her as I stared down at her secret, hopeless appeal against the world and time she lived in. … There in the silence of a timeless spring night it seemed natural enough … to begin to write” to Helen.
The magic lingers for Jake who admits to being “caught in the feeling of the warm, silent night.”
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I love Summer Solstice not because the day is longest, not because at its apex the sun seems to stand still in the sky. I love it because I know that after today the nights will grow longer again.
And as I lay on that striped beach towel when I was 13, I knew I had experienced the end of my belief in time as something fixed & flowing inexorably on: “The past, present, and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.”3
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While it’s true that time is an illusion, it’s also true that life teems with irreversible physical processes & so my Miss Havisham is dead.
I never thought much about why the heart is called a ticker. I suppose I thought it had something to do with the sound it makes. I didn’t associate the sound with a clock. But it seems to me now that the heart is exactly that, a clock. So now can’t not think about the clock stopping inside the ruined body of my Miss Havisham.
Here’s to the night & all the magic that happens there.
Editor, William Peden (1913-1999)
By Jack Finney (1911-1995)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)