"There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want." — Calvin
The splendid line, of course, belongs not to the austere reformer of Geneva, but the six-year-old anarchist at the heart of Bill Watterson’s iconic comic strip. The latter half of August hammers this point home with an inexorable finality. The summer, which back in June seemed an endless meadow of possibility, contracts without warning into a fortnight, and then the new academic year comes washing over us, freighted with its (not unwelcome!) duties and expectations. Reading lists are finalised, books ordered, sources printed, orientations planned. The great machinery of term lumbers noisily into motion once again.
This outward turning of the calendar is accompanied by an inward one, less voluble but a good deal weightier. We have entered the month of Elul.
Elul is the month in the Jewish calendar that immediately precedes Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holidays. It is not itself a festival, but something more protracted and in its own way more impactful: a month-long approach to the most spiritually charged days of the year, a demanding ascent of preparation, introspection, and the taking of moral inventory.
The word at the centre of the season is Teshuvah, commonly rendered as repentance, though the Hebrew indicates something at once plainer and more exacting: return. A return from sin and mindlessness, and a return to God, to the better self one has betrayed, and to the principles that, once upon a time, we swore to uphold.
New Year Greeting Card, early twentieth century.
