How many heat waves are we having this summer? Three, four, maybe? It is hard to say, because they have been so chained that I would say they have been like a continuum, more a wet dream of meteorologists looking for a comforting pattern than a real and thermometric perception. Someday this nightmare will end, I guess. In the meantime, we can try to find an equivalent to the famous tropical nights, which evoke caipirinhas, samba and debauchery, and this is not the case. It will also be the time to rescue from the drawer of half-forgotten words that beautiful pastoral verb, to bore. It’s what sheep do in a flock at the peak of midday summer, when they gather to take advantage of the shade of a tree or the meager shadow cast by their companions. They are still, without moving, with their heads bowed, waiting for those hours of trouble to pass to give way to a little air, who knows if to a cloud and four salvific drops. Now we’re all a bit lethargic, which is a word that can also be applied to a state of mind, which oscillates, depending on the temperament, between laziness, weakness and discouragement. We will have to start thinking about how we will cope when these anomalous summers are already structural, how everything will have to adapt, the economy, leisure, life in general, to circumstances that no one anticipated – or those who anticipated it were ignored. Sure there will be solutions, of course (you have to be optimistic: but we already know that an optimist is an ill-informed pessimist), but hey, we already saw that during the pandemic. We believed – they made us believe – that we would come out better and you see.
