HAPPY NEW YEAR

On New Year’s Eve, in his last diary entry for 1917, Wilfred Owen speaks of midnight as being the ‘intolerable instant of the change.’ It resonated with me when I first read it, over forty years ago, and it resonates with me even more today. Of course,  the ‘new’ in 'new year' is confection. In a reversal of the fairy story narrative, the pumpkin doesn’t suddenly become a gold carriage at midnight. Nature is oblivious to this man-made moment,- the change from 31/12 to 1/1. Yet we seem to need this sense of a new start, of fresh beginnings, resolutions to change behaviour, even the dream of wiping the slate clean. Sadly New Years Day is just another day in our life, yet we impress New Year's day with a significance that, given the usual grey light of morning, it finds impossible to bare.
So what made the change intolerable to Owen? I think it was a sense of this fraud, that, of course, nothing will change at all.
Still we pretend that the we have broken with yesterday and the pretence seems to serve a purpose, so, for what it is worth.


Happy New Year 


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