Spring Street summer

Description

In the summer of 1976, a young Englishman called "C." found himself in California. He had come to Santa Cruz to research his academic thesis on concepts of paradise in Western thought. Money was no problem - he had a fellowship. And through a stroke of luck he had located a pleasant place to live in a shared house on Spring Street, a house with a lovely sunny garden perched on the edge of the Pacific. To his surprise - and delight - he soon learned that he was living in. Something very like a modern version of the Garden of Eden. Nudity, sun, plenty of wine, uncomplicated sex - it was almost too good to be true: the very essence of that space and time once known as the Age of Aquarius. Fifteen years later, Christopher Hudson set off on an extraordinary personal quest to find that vanished young man, and to discover the truth about the summer on Spring Street. This book - comical, rueful, and often profoundly moving - tells the story of. That quest. It begins with fragments of memory: a primal scream, a passionate embrace on a high promontory, digging a vegetable garden in company with three naked girls and a snake slithering down a tree. Bit by bit, as he tracks down the people he knew and lived with that glowing summer, searching them out in the places to which time has taken them (a Detroit lawyer's office, a Buddhist retreat in Nova Scotia, a faculty study in Berkeley), he gradually sees how much of. The truth has been forgotten or misunderstood, how much darkness there has been behind the light. Spring Street Summer is about the joy of simple love and the pain of growing up. Threaded through it is a meditation on the Genesis story, and on our gradual loss of faith in the message of an unregainable paradise. It is a book for people of every generation who look over their shoulders at the past.

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