Every twelve months, for reasons once related to astronomical phenomena and agricultural needs but now to calendar sales, charitable fund raising and orderly accounting, we declare that a “new year” has begun, recap the preceding twelvemonth and make predictions about the one aborning, recalling at the same time that last year’s predictions mostly missed the mark by somewhere between a country and a continental mile.
All this strikes me as a great waste of time, energy and resources, the very opposite of the frugal practice of recycling advocated by right thinking folk from 17th Century New England Puritans through 21st Century Blue America Progressives. Isn’t it time to extend the wise insight that impels us to sort our weekly trash into the more consequential area of time keeping? Rather than build a New Year from scratch and later bemoan its shoddy construction, let us pick an old one and recycle it.
My prime candidate is 1815, a year that from quiet beginnings – Europe and America resting after the tumult of war, crowns resettling on heads that had been imperiled for the past quarter century, the Corsican Ogre locked away on the island of Elba – erupted into high drama – the Ogre’s return and “a damned nice thing, the nearest run thing you ever saw” – and ended by ushering in a century of general peace and prosperity that, sadly, came to an end in 1914 and has revived only partially and shakily since then. No good thing lasts forever. We wear out our most useful possessions, such as competent, unobtrusive government, and are left with knick-knacks like impressionist paintings, grandiose musical compositions and “true to life” literature.
Other years are appealing, too. The one during my lifetime that has a trajectory most similar to 1815 is 1980, which, after stagflation at home and humiliation abroad, eventuated in the improbable elevation to the Presidency of an actor and political autodidact who turned out to have a better grasp of how to preside over a country than did all the experts.
And then there was 1989, when the seemingly invincible Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed like a burst balloon into Russia, a Russia that has since regressed to its historical mean of autocracy, poverty and paranoia. (We still await its Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Tchaikovsky. We already have its Nicholas I.)
I have a soft spot also for 1920, when Americans chose “normalcy” over permanent wartime economic controls, and even 2016, which wasn’t all that terrific in many ways but did hustle the Wicked Witch of Little Rock into long overdue retirement from public life.
Many years to choose from. Why must we endure a 2022?
Nonetheless, Happy New Year!
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