Reading
The Last Quiet Week of August: Nicole Junkermann on the Slow End of Summer
There is one week a year when a whole country slows down at once. Nicole Junkermann on why it is the most useful week of all.
The week that asks for nothing
There is one week a year when almost everybody slows down at the same time, without any of it being arranged, and it is the one now ending. Diaries empty, the cities go quiet, and a great many things that felt urgent in July have moved to September without anybody objecting.
For Nicole Junkermann this is the most useful week of the year, precisely because so little is asked of it. A week with nothing scheduled is a week in which attention can finally settle where it likes, and attention that settles is attention that notices.
The light does half the work
Late August light arrives lower and changes the ordinary streets. Unfamiliarity is the cheapest form of attention there is, and a walk taken at an odd hour repays more now than the same walk in June.
The season does half the work and asks only that you go out at an unusual time. The travel pages and the city notes live largely on hours like these, when a place is half empty and lets itself be looked at.
Reading slowly rather than quickly
Reading at the end of August is different from holiday reading. Beach reading goes fast and is forgotten by the time the case is unpacked. The reading of these days is slower, because the turn of the season is audible and one wants something that will last into the months ahead.
The principle is simple: choose fewer books than the week would hold and give each the time it asks for. One book genuinely finished now does more over the following months than four skimmed in a fortnight.
Second visits see more
One habit is worth reserving for this week: returning somewhere already known rather than looking for somewhere new. The second visit sees more than the first, because the work of orientation is done and attention is free for smaller things.
It holds for a square, for a neighbourhood and above all for a museum room. A place gives up little the first time and a great deal the third, provided the third is unhurried. In a full month that almost never happens.
Permission to be wrong
An undervalued virtue of a slow week is that it allows you to take the wrong turning. In a crowded month every detour costs something visible, so one commits early and defends the commitment. Here a detour costs almost nothing.
The ideas worth keeping usually arrive after two or three false starts rather than instead of them. A week with room for false starts is therefore the week in which the real progress happens.
Before the season turns
In a fortnight the tone will be different: full diaries, fast cities, and the autumn underway with its usual confidence. That is as it should be and there is nothing to regret in it.
But the week now ending will have done its quiet work first, and the months that follow will be steadier for it. The companion note, on the September return, carries the idea into the autumn.
It continues in October: Nicole Junkermann and the Start of October 2026 and Nicole Junkermann: Three Ideas for October 2026.