The End of Eves

Among dedicated drinkers, New Year’s Eve is known as “Amateur’s Night,” a once-a-year bacchanalia for the out-of- and never-in-practice. It signifies little but a harbinger of hangovers, a pretext for socially sanctioned debauchery -- which isn't always a bad thing. With age, the turning of the year is just another reminder of time’s accelerating rate of evaporation. More so in the North than at these compromised latitudes, the new year signals the start of the long, dark, cold, holiday-free ascent to Spring. One enters a dim cave illuminated briefly and treacherously by the February thaw, followed by the revenge of March. I miss this seasonal predictability, though Verlyn Klinkenborg reminds me of it in The Rural Life, his chronicle of a year on his farm in upstate New York. Here’s part of his entry for January:

“All of the days with eves before them are behind us now for another year. The grand themes -- rebirth and genial carnality -- have come and gone like a Chinook wind, bringing a familiar end-of-year thaw to body and spirit. Now the everyday returns and with it the ordinary kind of week in which Friday doesn’t turn into Sunday -- and Saturday into Sunday -- as it has for two weeks running. It’s time for a week in which each morning throws off a magnetic field all its own, when it’s no trick telling Tuesday from Wednesday just by the sound of the alarm clock or the mood of your spouse.”

Only a middle-aged writer, for whom predictability has displaced novelty as the foremost virtue, could compose or appreciate such a passage. My New Year’s Eves blur into sameness -- passed out in youth, asleep each year since. My only distinctive New Year’s Eve came in 1993, when I visited a friend in Albuquerque. The farthest west I had traveled earlier was South Dakota, and I found the harsh, brown landscape of New Mexico seductive. On New Year’s Eve we drove to Chaco Canyon, once the center of Anasazi life. I have no interest in Native American culture but the quiet beauty of this site, dating from about 900 to 1130 A.D., is stunning. The temperature was in the highs 50s, and the quality of the light evoked a word I had never used before -- “pellucid.” We hiked across the escarpment and ate a lunch of cold tamales above Pueblo Bonita. That night, back in Albuquerque, we attended a conventional New Year’s Eve party and I was, as usual, bored, not up to the obligatory social performance after a visit to the place Edgar Bowers evokes in “Chaco Canyon.” It begins:

“Plato, my lord, might wonder, if he saw,
As we saw, from the cliff, the holy city
Built like a cave, its front shaped to the arc
The East’s bright arrow follows in its flight.”

Chaco Canyon, like the coming year, is a mystery. In the face of mystery, resolutions are a comforting futility. Like the exquisite geometry of Pueblo Bonita, they echo with the vanity of human wishes.