There are certain summer days in England when the heat bring a hallucinatory, even eerie stillness to the landscape.
One feels that, with the next breath of wind, everything might shimmer and disappear. Beneath the glory of the hedgerows lurks the horror that this will not last.
Thomas de Quincey noted this feeling in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1819):
The contemplation of death generally, is (caeteris paribus) more affecting in summer than in any other season of the year . . . The exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave.
For it may be observed generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other.
On these accounts it is that I find it impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the endless days of summer.
Written by : Paul Morgan
