those childhood summers

The fair in the month of August brought me many other sadnesses and exaltations. The full spectacle swelled like a symphony, from the prelude of isolated attractions that arrived much before the others and that indicated the general tone of the fair, like the prolonged stray notes that announce the entire theme of the composition at the beginning of the concert, to the grandiose conclusion, bursting forth with shouts, shots and fanfare on the culminating day, followed by the immense silence of the field, deserted once again. 

The few attractions that came early encompassed, in essence, the whole fair and represented it exactly. It was enough that only the first of them were set up, for all the colors, all the brilliance and all the carbide smell of the whole fair to descend into town.

In the obscurity of the boulevard a tiara of colored glass would light up toward evening, like the earth’s first constellation. Soon others would follow and the boulevard became a luminous corridor, along which I would wander, speechless, as I had once seen, in an illustrated edition of Jules Verne, a boy my age, leaning against the porthole of a submarine, looking out into the suboceanic darkness, at the wonderful and mysterious marine phosphorescences.

from:

MAX BLECHER,
Adventures in Immediate Unreality 

translated by Jeanie Han