Summer girls

They reappear this time of year like little woodland nymphs reemerging after a long winter season.

This picture of Brigitte Bardot summarizes to me what they try to capture when they put on their pretty things: ephemeral beauty. That dangerous nymphette charm that Nabokov wrote about.

But why try to capture something that is ephemeral? It's a losing proposition, after all.

I might quote a friend and say, it's because of the whiteness of the whale. The railing against certainty and death--the certainty of death, yes, but also just certainty itself.

Perhaps both men and women hunt for an elusive thing. Though these things might seem so different--to kill one thing, to hold another--the reasons are one and the same. And both, fairly impossible.