'Do These Things Go Out With Life?'

“The last day of the year – a cold but bright and sunny day, with a film of fluffy snow on the bare ground. Where there are weeds, the snow is not apparent.” 

My youngest son asked why people still make a big deal out of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day: “It seems so arbitrary.” I didn’t have a glibly fatherly answer, at least not one that might make sense to a seventeen-year-old. When I was his age, December 31 was a ready-made excuse to stay up late, with at least one more day off before school resumed. My crowd called it “Amateur’s Night,” when non-drinkers or dainty drinkers drank. New Year’s Day was an addendum to Christmas. It never inspired thoughts of time’s wingèd chariot. I feel no longing for the holidays of the past. They have always carried a hint of bittersweetness, a sense of opportunity missed. To call this melancholy would seem melodramatic. The passage above is from the painter Charles Burchfield’s journal entry for December 31, 1946. He continues:

 

“This year I seemed to reach some sort of milestone – gone was the acute nostalgia for my boyhood Christmases . . . Not that all yearnings for past Christmas joys were absent however. Every so often would come a pang of regret for the half-revealed memories of incidents that perhaps never existed.”

 

Burchfield is wise enough to know one must be skeptical of nostalgia, and that memory is a faculty of the imagination. My one remaining New Year’s Eve ritual is to read Charles Lamb’s Elia essay “New Year’s Eve.” Lamb’s customary silliness is in evidence, of course, as is a muted awareness of mortality. It’s one of Lamb’s profoundest creations. He writes:

 

“I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.—Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. . . . A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”