There is something Platonic about summer in Sweden. On one level, it is an abstraction, a collection of ideal things about summer, much as I remember summers from childhood, even though they could never have been like this. But it’s a fact that the light here is yellower, the sky brighter blue; it’s like looking at an old color photograph of summer, lens flare and all. And just as with a photograph, there are no flies (yet), and no humidity, and the sun in the late afternoon seems fixed in the sky — it will hover there for as long as you care to look.
Summer in Sweden is also a summer of the mind. It’s brilliant daylight outside at 5 am, and by then you feel as guilty as sleeping till noon in New York. People go to work early, but then spend most of the day rooted in parks and on terrace cafés — human sunflowers. After work, behind the Kungliga Biblioteket in Södermalm, they’ll play a mysterious game that involves setting up a miniature wooden set from The Lord of the Rings, then taking turns destroying it by throwing wooden sticks at is, playing Sauron. It goes on for hours. I sometimes go to watch, pretending to read my first Swedish-language novel, a Henning Mankell detective thriller. My main fear: At the end of the novel the detective will tell me whodunnit, and I just won’t get it. Is there a word for butler in Swedish?
There is no exact equivalent for “butler”. You will probably see it rendered as “betjänt” (servant) or simply left as “butler”.
“Platonic” hmmm. Why? You didn’t explain. Is it Platonic because this summer you’re not getting the shags in with the people you want to and you have to settle for just being friends?
Or because everyone goes around in togas and disputes a lot?
…or, alternately, because you’re sitting in a cave watching a simulcra of a swedish summer projected onto the walls.
I think it might be a political statement. Sweden being a more socialist country is run closer to the “we know best” mandate of the philospher kings in “The Republic”. It is therefore more Platonic during the summer, and in fact would be so throughout the year.
The UK, on the other hand, being more of a muddle, would have more Aristotelian summers.
Nope, I think it was just a spelling mistake, brought on by Steffan’s mid-West accent. He meant play-dough. On one level, it is an abstraction, a collection of ideal things waiting to be formed, much as I remember from childhood, even though they could never have been like this –because I was always crap at modelling, and have the C in art to prove it. But it’s a fact that the dough is brighter blue…
Today’s National Day. We have
Today’s National Day. We have a very laidback attitude to it, the very opposite of Yank style flag-waving. It’s not even a holiday. People have talked about making it a holiday for a hundred years, but we’ve never got around…