Every single time I listen to The Wallflowers’ Here in Pleasantville, this line lingers longer than the others. It stands apart from the rest of the song, not because it is dramatic, but because it is so plainly true. There is something humbling in the idea that distance travelled, obstacles overcome, understanding deepened, do not carry us beyond beginnings. They only teach us that beginnings return.
Perhaps this is why August has always felt slightly uneasy to me. It is still summer, unmistakably. The light is strong, the fields are dry, the days carry the weight of heat. And yet something has shifted. July has the confidence of arrival. August already contains the return.
As a child, I did not think much in months. There was my birthday, of course, and December, with its advent calendar and Christmas Eve. The rest was less clearly divided. Time was measured in other ways: by whether school was in session or not, by whether we were in the garden, by who was present, by what could be eaten straight from the bush, by the long elasticity of days that did not yet need to justify themselves.
Only later did summer become divided into chapters. As a teenager, I spent several summers in France, and one before my final exams in Tuscany. These were no longer summers without contour. They had purpose: language, improvement, expectation. Even the freedom of holidays came with a direction. And often, what had changed only became visible afterwards, when I returned home.
It is when the world begins to lean forward. Businesses prepare for what comes next. September approaches with its schedules, decisions, school rhythms, work rhythms, and in some places, absurdly early thoughts of Christmas. The season is still present, but the machinery has already begun to move beneath it.
There is something almost comic in that, and also something truthful. We like to imagine progress as distance: we have been somewhere, learned something, crossed a threshold, become someone different. And then a familiar rhythm returns and places us, once again, at the beginning. Not because nothing has changed, but because beginnings are not reserved for the inexperienced. August gives this return its particular form: the fields harvested, the straw gathered, the days still warm, and yet something already turned. One has been far, or thinks one has. And still, here it is again: another beginning.