On the fourth floor of Alderman Library, seated at a very old table on a chair with less-than-functional wheels, I peer out of a foot-wide window looking down onto Nameless Field, and I watch the sun finally fall into a slumber after a beautiful weekend-long performance. The window provides a small view into the outside world for those sitting at this particular desk, missing out on the afternoon weather.
We are conditioned to think banter about the weather is banal — a staple of everyday conversation. We use weather-talk to avoid sharing uncomfortable silence with a classmate, or an elevator-mate, or the mailman. Talking about the clouds transcends your occupation, age or gender. But I want to talk about it in a way that doesn’t make my readers yawn, or lose interest in my words.
A book I was reading today had the following quote: “It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention. Those sounds, strung as they are in their peculiar and particular order, never change, but do nothing but change.”
If there is ever one topic whose meanings and intention, in Percival Everett’s terms, vary so, it’s that of weather. When we say to a stranger, “The weather is so beautiful!” there is so much more packed into the statement than the simple definition of those four words. The intention is to break the silence, to find a common ground. But the meaning — the meaning is so much more, and evokes a feeling different for each person.
The meaning is the desire to abandon all obligations — to round up friends, buy a six-pack of bottlenecks and sprawl out on a patchwork blanket on the greenest patch of grass that can be seen. To hide drunk eyes behind sunglasses and stumble laughing into The Virginian for a warm sandwich, to fall into a deep slumber in a soft, warm bed shortly after the sun’s gone away as a form of refusal — refusal to accept the day’s ending.
The passion for the outdoors, which is buried away in the winter months, comes out for springtime. As the days warm, we long to escape the indoors where we are confined to a particular sphere, realm, desk or cubicle. On Fridays in April, when everyone is welcome outdoors and on porches and yards, we run into friends on similar highs and fall into warm, skin-on-skin embraces with them — to the extent our summer attire allows.
The incessant music coming from every open Lawn door and every Corner bar patio dances about in my ears, providing them their own sensory pleasure to accompany the natural warmth from the sun enveloping my arms and shoulders. The songs of summer allow us to escape from the trivialities of everyday life and join humanity in the fight for happiness — or just summer.
Mine is an exhaustive and specific interpretation of the phrase, but yours is probably different. No matter what the sun brings out in you, don’t allow yourself to take the phrase “it’s so nice out” for any less than it’s worth. It may be “mere sounds strung together,” whose melody is most often played in meaningless conversations, but it is nevertheless a tune that should not be taken for granted — because it means so much more.
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