'Do These Things Go Out With Life?'

My favorite passages in all of Charles Lamb’s work are from one of his Elia essays, “New Year’s Eve,” written two centuries ago:

“I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years,—from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective.”

It’s a recurrent theme, one he sometimes shares with his friend Hazlitt. When an editor rejects one of his sonnets, Lamb declares to Bryan Waller Procter in an 1829 letter: “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!” -- a rousing fight song for any serious writer. Twenty years earlier, long before the birth of Elia, in a letter to his childhood friend Coleridge, Lamb says: “I am out of the world of readers. I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up unto the old things.”

Even his taste in books was retrospective. He loved Burton, Browne and the lesser Elizabethan dramatists – minority sentiments in his age and ours. We are encouraged to review the past year, weigh our triumphs and failings, and resolve, always, to do better – “fail better,” in Samuel Beckett’s winning phrase. Lamb tells us he has, in effect, kept a backwards-looking resolution:  

“I plunge into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I am armour-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel.”

In modern parlance, screw guilt. Resolve to have no regrets. If only it were so easy. After various digressive detours, Lamb gets around to what’s on his mind: “this intolerable disinclination to dying—to give it its mildest name—does more especially haunt and beset me.” The waning of the old year reminds him of mortality. Lamb would, in fact, live for almost another fourteen years, dying at age fifty-nine. He rallies—sort of:

“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.”

People still ring in the New Year, I assume, bibulously. Those in Alcoholics Anonymous refer to New Year’s Eve as “amateur’s night.” Rookies and those out of practice turn into ambitious drinkers. For some, it’s a civilized celebration; for others, a handy excuse for one more night of oblivion. Lamb wouldn’t object:

“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?”