Desire: Prelude — A Series

On the life-affirming pleasures of summertime

Summering at its best.

Today is the first day of summer. It is a season of sun-stretched days and longing, alfresco dinners and going out for ice cream afterward, music festivals backdropped by a setting sun, where young women link arms in the way of girlhood, skipping and dancing in the grass while their male counterparts look on, amused. It is for eating stone fruits and strawberries and cubes of melon, for reading in the park, and later, in bed, lying outstretched on top of the sheets as fresh air drifts in through open windows. Summer evokes bare, salty skin and the smell of sunscreen, a crisp glass of Sauvignon Blanc, conversations with strangers, sunlight shimmering on the undulating surface of a swimming pool or body of water.

Looking back, so many of my most vivid encounters with desire seem to have unfolded in the summertime. I moved into my college dorm in the summer, as one does, and, since dorms are pressure cookers of desire, felt it so vividly in those early weeks: the excitement of budding crushes, newfound freedom, the strange electricity of college parties, and being suddenly surrounded by other bodies in close proximity. I fell in love for the first time in the summer. I moved to New York City, and years later to London, in the summer. The latter move kicked off my favourite summer yet, and I came around to the season in ways I hadn’t before. So much living, it seems to me, takes place in the summertime.

Summer is a time for giving in—fully and completely—to the thrill of experience: loosened inhibitions, togetherness, embodiment. If winter is a time for being with oneself (retreating, thinking), then summer demands the opposite: flirting with the world, living, desiring.

Desire is, of course, an expansive and endlessly fascinating subject—fertile ground for novels and films, songs and conversations, fantasies and regrets. As the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz puts it, happiness is “the sweetness of desiring what you have, fully aware of its fragility, its brevity and its limits.” Desire, I have found, makes it easier to bear the passage of time itself.

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself thinking about desire constantly—its exquisite beauty and its complications—and drawing on my own experiences while looking to art, culture, and the people around me for clarity. This has resulted in an eight-part essay series that will arrive in your inbox every Sunday starting next week.

I hope you’ll read them amid your own summer escapades, that they lend richness to languid afternoons, and spark curiosity about your relationship to desire and all that it illuminates. That they prompt you to look more closely at your attractions—what pulls and moves you—to ask yourself what you really want and why, and to sit with the tensions that follow, or simply see something familiar anew.

Most of all, I hope they bring pleasure and insight, awaken memories of past desires and ignite present ones, and offer something like desire itself: the simple, precious gift of presence that makes this summer feel more alive.

If you’re new on the block, The Existentialist is a newsletter about living fully, thinking critically, and the intersection between them. While I can’t deliver baked goods to your doorstep, I can land in your inbox on Sunday mornings. More on what to expect here.

My social life lately has mostly consisted of book events. Here’s the debrief:

• Last week, I attended a talk at the V&A for Jenny Walton’s new book Jenny Sais Quoi. I actually hadn’t heard of her before, but found her immensely likeable and charming. She spoke about navigating life in Milan as an American, breakups, serendipitous meet-cutes, the kooky characters in the world of vintage, and the life-changing magic of JW Anderson’s pigeon purse. (A lover of ridiculous handbags myself, I’m a firm believer that an element of intrigue in an outfit is the secret to bringing more whimsy—and more conversations with strangers—into your life.) If you fancy a listen, you can watch a recording here.

• I also attended an event at Liberty hosted by Phoebe Lovatt in partnership with Byredo on the subject of summer reading lists—a high-stakes category! It reminded me of the time I saw someone reading A Little Life on the beach, and it took everything in me to not go over and offer an unsolicited warning. Anyway, Phoebe was lovely (not to mention stunning!) in person. I recommend giving her podcast a listen.

• The last stop on my book bender was celebrating my friend Carlos Barragán’s debut, The Yahoo Boys, at Burley Fisher Books, which I’m looking forward to reading. The book follows Carlos’s journey to Nigeria in an attempt to find his mother’s romance scammer, but based on the conversation that evening, I suspect it’s also a book about empathy, loneliness, and desperation.

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See you next Sunday for the first essay in my Desire Series. In the meantime, here’s some mood music to soundtrack your summering.