George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress In last Sunday’s Metropolitan section, Benjamin Weiser exhumed an article about the summer heat that was published in this newspaper in 1852. No mere weather story, it combined meticulous detail, social commentary and references to art and literature â€" all rendered in spectacularly overwrought prose. We asked readers to write their own over-the-top odes to the temperature in response; a selection is below.
A haze of sweat settles over our groaning, rumbling, whirling city. Manhattan is no stranger to such simmering summers, but every year it seems the hot season has packed a little extra sizzle. The morning commute becomes a boggy Odyssey. Weekends are better, but barely; you might even be lucky enough to beat the B&T crowd to one of the mausoleum-esque museums, where the swelter of the day seems to fade into myth, or you could opt for a staycation in the arctic comfort of your own apartment.
You make the mistake of wishing for the return of winter, begging December to hurry up with its wind-chill, having forgotten the misery of the annual freeze here in New York. You pine away in your cubicle, romanticizing about weekend plans in the Rockaways, or the Hamptons, or just about anywhere with more water and less traffic. Unfortunately, everyone else has the same idea, including the Weather. Your options are: melt here, or roast there. But after the daily drudgery is done, and happy hour’s frozen margaritas are emptied, you’re glad to have the sunset, to watch the furnace close its doors above Hoboken, and watch your city glow one last shade of red like the smoldering embers of a camp-fire in the Catskills. And as you nestle your head in the cool side of a pillow tonight, you dream not of December, but the sweet treasure of tomorrow morning’s cool shower.
â€" Alessio Mineo, Manhattan
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It is a pitiful sight oft seen in these days of torrid heat: The unsuspecting tourist in her cork wedge is trapped mid-stride by the scourge of licorice-colored tar pits that plague our underground subway platforms. The good citizen giggles and then inevitably, she wagers to move. She cannot. The gum, hibernating during arctic winters, has been brought to sticky life by the very same monstrous air that drains us of purpose, of civility, of all temperance. The gamine senses that she is not alone but as she looks around, she wails. Her fellow travelers are also blameless victims of these ponds of simmering rubber. Her smartphone has been rendered feckless. No frequency can reach her under the scooped out earth. Mercifully, the approaching locomotive swaddles us in scorching dry gusts and we are set free. But we are not unscarred as the black-tendrilled residue coats our shod foot.
â€" Jan, Stone Ridge, NY
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The hideous sun, swollen like a rotten maggot upon the face of the heavens, beat down upon my sweat-besotted brow like an infernal hammer, straight from the depth of the lower pits of Hell. Alas, that I had lived to see these days of living nightmare, the great masses of the city fleeing in their thousands to the shores of our trash-strewn city. Fortunate man that I was, I praised the gods for giving me the wonders of the lightning, harnessed to Man’s needs, in the form of the brilliant inventor Carrier, whose clever mind had devised a means by which esoteric gases are forced through metal channels, the end result being that the air within my dark chambers, instead of scorching my very being, was cooled and flowed delightfully upon my person.
â€" Andrew Porter, Brooklyn Heights
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This relentless, cruel, unnatural heat is a plague and scourge and no accident of climate nor curious abnormality. Which is why no thinking man nor woman, or none whose brain is not already devoid of necessary moisture to ignite thought, would consider me a Soulless blasphemer upon hearing me boldly confront the sovereign draped Bishops and Chief Rabbis, pungent and wet like beneath their finery, and state, inflating my nearly collapsed lungs, that God himself has tipped the sun’s cruel furnace to spill its boiling contents into our formerly pure empyrean, and turn our cheerful blue into an infected sphere, and our air into bile, to punish his contemptuous, proud and vile children.
Surely the Father of all, having once tried to drown us, now seems content to transform our streets into infernal frying pans â€" taking this prerogative of the Devil, to prepare us cowing beasts for what will follow, our complete and total eradication. This searing heat, poured from heaven to punish, nay, cleanse by fire, the naked greed, proud indifference and most searing hypocrisy, which has transformed “the beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!†into the most disgusting insects bred in the most foul sewage. Disowned, we will endure until we are not merely liquidated, but literally liquified into foul pools of human waste.
â€" RWordplay, New York
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It wasn’t the heat so much that drained the soul, though the temperatures soared and seemed lodged forever in the mid-90s. It wasn’t the insidious humidity that sapped the energy, drenching brow and back and everywhere in between, beginning in the morning and never ceasing until the last shower of the day. It wasn’t even the smells permeating from the mountainous trash heaps that line the city blocks, or the odors wafting up from the subways, or from the people themselves as they scuttled from place to place on the searing streets of the city, or that unwashed unpleasantness arose from the red-faced sweating guy next to you on the subway whose stop couldn’t come soon enough. The anguish of it all was the way that time stands still in a heat wave, creating the impression that the hellish days of oppressive heat and humidity and odors that cannot be adequately described and must be experienced would never come to an end, and might well be our new normal, from now until the end of time.
€" borntorun45, NY
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A bead of sweat fell from my forehead
on to your forearm.
You looked up â€" no clouds overhead.
Your eyes slithered over me.
I said lets get some.
Ice
Cream.
â€" Chu Wang, Charlotte, NC
