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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 31, 2006
Happy New Year
It has been a tradition in the modern West to make personal resolutions for the Octave of Christmas -- has been, I should think, roughly since it also came to be known as New Year’s Day, a few centuries back. There is no particular reason why the 1st of January should be New Year’s. We got along perfectly well when the secular year changed in March. To this day, the world’s observers of lunar calendars celebrate the year’s change at varied solar points, and even Eastern Christendom has still to get with Pope Gregory’s reform of the Julian calendar.That would be Gregory XIII, as I am reminded by an old note in a commonplace book, and the changeover from the old system was made in 1582. Is it too late to mention the reform was actually proposed by Aloysius Lilius (or Luigi Giglio, as he was known to his friends), a medical doctor from Calabria? See his excellent tract, Compendium novae rationis restituendi kalendarium, hot off the presses in 1577. And who says the Catholic Church is always lagging in reforms? Through most of the last 20 centuries or so, it has been at the cutting edge. But then, there is no particular reason to make resolutions on any given day. I have myself somewhat subverted the modern custom, by making my own annual resolution -- in the singular -- for the first Sunday in Advent. My scheme of self-improvement for liturgical 2007 is to somehow give up indulging one of my most pleasurable sins. I publish that resolution here, carefully transcribed from my current commonplace book, so that readers may try to hold me to it: “My resolution, in the new church year, should be to overcome my habit of deprecation: not against classes, but against individuals, including especially those who have done me little injuries -- and ideally, behind their backs. It does me no good to complain, it rectifies nothing. Rarely could it even provide a warning to another person, against the risks of dealing with the sinner in question. It offers me no psychological comfort, for I feel dirty after telling my complaint, as if my persecutor had victimized me again. I get no relief, even when what I have said is both strictly and contextually true. And when I’m merely commenting acidly, on another who is none of my affair, what do I accomplish? I can only be seeking a new enemy, while cultivating a false friend.” (This is not going to be easy, I reflect. For I am not only severely tempted to the sin of deprecation. I also have a gift for it.) My more progressive readers, looking at this fine resolution over my shoulder, as it were, would discount it the quicker if they could read the very next entry in the book. Well, no, it is not a spontaneous and juicy example of the deprecation I have just condemned (that has to wait until the next page), but rather, of the general backwardness of my views: “In a healthy marriage, the husband looks upon his wife not only as a friend, a lover, a companion, his fellow-traveller, his last ally in the ditches of this world; as the daughter of a noble family, and the mother of his children; but also as a servant.” (Yes, I thought that would go over well, after a century of suffragette-feminism.) What am I getting at? -- to ask the obvious reader’s question. The man begins with a flourish on resolution-making, is immediately side-laned by calendar reform, promises to expound the sin of deprecation, then meanders into the difficulties of marriage. Has Warren been over-celebrating the season, perhaps? I try always to end where I began, and to collect my stray asides to the purpose. My sermon for today is indeed on keeping resolutions, and by extension on making strait a human trajectory, that is inclined by nature to wobble. It strikes me that the keeping of a commonplace book -- not a diary, but rather the literary equivalent of a sketchbook; pointed not like diaries to the past alone, but in every temporal and spatial direction -- is a very useful practice to this end. One may write down one’s impressions and resolutions, and many other things -- for instance passages from reading that seem worth transcribing -- so as better to fix everything in mind. In commonplace books, we can assimilate so much that would otherwise slip by us. (One may even do little drawings in the margins. But mind that they are not deprecating.) If I could recommend one resolution to my reader, for this New Year, it would be to open a commonplace book -- to put all the grey down in black and white. One may use it to escape the gravitational forces of this vale, veil, and vail of tears, by holding an honest and continuous conversation with one’s better self. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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