Note: Andy Newman will be teaching Creative Writing: Awakening Wonder with Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Bradbury this summer for Kepler. Class begins June 29. This essay first appeared June 23, 2006, at National Review Online.
Every summer I never fail to take my paperback copy of Dandelion Wine down from the shelf. I say this not to brag, not to be that front-row kid who dashed through the school’s approved summer reading list in the first weeks of break and moved on to War and Peace and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. In fact, I rarely reread the novel from start to finish when the 21st of June races by on the calendar. Yet I’ve come to realize I must dip into those yellowing pages, adding yet another crease to the rippled binding, otherwise something seems missing from the season, something’s not quite right.
English journalist Hillarie Belloc maintained he could go no longer than a year without repairing to Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. In Samuel Johnson’s proto-novel, the prince leaves the Happy Valley to find his way in, and the ways of, the world. Belloc found following the prince’s journey necessary for him to keep his own bearings in life.
It’s not, I think, a bearing in life I seek. It’s an annual desire to reacquaint myself with the vistas of summer. Vistas wide and golden as the prairie itself. Times when school hallways darkened and three months of light beckoned. Days when the air seemed saturated with possibilities.
Read the entire essay here.
