Wit & Attitude Quote by Hugo Claus

Desire arrives here as a nuisance first, a weather event second. Claus stages the seasons like a cheap theater for the body: spring’s “first warmth” doesn’t awaken anything noble; it makes “they” go limp, surrendering at the slightest cue. The verb choice is faintly contemptuous, as if erotic readiness is less an achievement than a reflex. By the time summer hits, that reflex has consequences: “they ruin my summer” drips with comic grievance, the way a hangover ruins a morning. Pleasure is not denied, just taxed. The line admits appetite while resenting the mess it makes of a life that wants to stay orderly.

Then autumn flips the register into scent and gender: “they smell of women.” It’s a startlingly intimate sense to end on, because smell is memory without permission. The women are not characters; they’re an atmosphere clinging to the speaker, proof of contact and of time passed. Subtextually, the “they” (almost certainly flowers, perhaps more pointedly lilies, often linked to funerals and sexuality) become a proxy for the speaker’s own cycles: quick arousal, prolonged distraction, then lingering trace.

Claus, a Flemish novelist steeped in postwar European frankness, often writes against bourgeois tidiness. This line works because it refuses the pastoral lie that seasons purify us. Nature here is not a balm; it’s an accomplice to compulsion, a calendar of desire that keeps returning, indifferent to the speaker’s complaints and perfectly skilled at leaving a smell behind.