What is the Solstice Project?

What is the Solstice Project?

That probably remains to be seen.

I have been thinking about how we move through time, and how time moves around us. 

We all have developed our own ways of joking about time in the post- (or almost post-)pandemic era. One of my friends has taken to saying "ten years ago" for anything that happened. "Oh, we've been dating for ten years." "Oh, I haven't seen him in ten years." Oh, it's been about ten years since we last traveled to ..." You fill in the blank.

During the pandemic, we realized more clearly than ever that we "fix" our memories with the help of the calendar. Holidays, family gatherings, annual conferences, trips for work or for fun. The easiest way to remember something is to attach it to some event. And then you know when it happened relative to everything else.

I imagine that not everyone cares the way I do about time. But being a literary historian means that it matters to me what happened in 1891 as opposed to 1918. Even the month matters -- was that a story written over a long lazy summer, or was that poem inspired by frosty windows in a cold January? And of course as an academic I can frequently say things like: "I met that student in Masterpieces of Russian Literature in the spring semester of 2018." (Indeed, I can sometimes "see" a student whom I remember poorly if I can figure out what the building and classroom for the course were. A student will contact me for a recommendation and I'll realize -- oh, you are that guy, tallish, blondish, sat in front of the former military woman with the purple hair and one row over from the current military woman who had knee surgery during the course of the semester. Now I remember your final essay on why you love Dostoevsky.)

As we move (we hope!) out of the pandemic, it seems more important than ever to me to figure out how to fix people, places, events, experiences in my memory. Perhaps too because I'm not sure how frequently, if at all, I will be visiting places in the coming years (when will I go back to Russia? Will I ever go back to China?), I want to think about what I did and where and when.

Five years ago I went to Russia for a week in June. It happened that my mentor was having an 80th birthday celebration, and I realized that though I'd been to Russia in the autumn of that (rare) sabbatical year, I had not made it to St. Petersburg. So I took the opportunity to hop over, and the flight enabled me not just to spend a week with friends and colleagues in Petersburg and Vyborg, but also to stop on the way home in Helsinki.

Since that trip in particular, I've been thinking about the solstice. Both solstices, in fact. When I was younger (early faculty days, pre-children), I used to sneak out of the country in December to spend two or three weeks in libraries in St. Petersburg. I used to joke that it was so hard to get out of bed in mid-December. I'd set alarms for 8, and 8:30, and 9. By the time I left the apartment for a library it was usually somewhat light out, but in the afternoon it was dark already again by 2:30 or 3, so I would walk home in twilight having barely experienced "day" at all. In Petersburg, with the snow and the streetlamps, the air just felt different. 

The same is true of summer solstice in the north. The air just feels different when the light (almost) never fades.

My solstice project means that I want to think carefully about where I spend the winter and the summer solstice, the shortest and longest days of the year. We usually take a winter solstice hike as a family, and I cherish that opportunity even when I'm just in Ohio. But if I plan to spend the solstice somewhere special, I can document where I meet it twice a year, how I feel, where I am.

Not sure yet what I will blog about, but I'm guessing time. Memory. The quality of the air, whether crisp and cold or warm and breezy. The quality of light as it hits the trees, or the buildings, around me. We shall see.