We have decided
(it was Caroline's suggestion) to consider and celebrate February 1st
as New Year’s Day.
Traditional
Gregorian calendar January 1st follows Christmas much too closely, and
invariably the Holiday Season (which we all hope to find enjoyable, but the
measure of joy actually achieved is often in direct proportion to the exhausting efforts
made in its pursuit) and Year both end and begin in a confused and spent state.
January is usually a mental and emotional
struggle, regathering and regrouping, and February’s arrival seems like a
twilight respite from a dark, dreamed battle.
Therefore,
around here at least, we’re henceforth assigning to January
last-month-of-the-year/ring out the old duties (and thanking its thirty-one
days for allowing one extra moment for clean-up and organization) and Starting Over Today.
We believe
this system will work much better than the previous one. If last night's New Year's Eve dinner with Jane offers any indication, things augur well for our
family and the world.
On Monday (an otherwise rotten day), The Assassin’s Cloak, An Anthology of the
World’s Greatest Diarists (editors Irene and Alan Taylor, Edinburgh, Canongate
Books, 2000), arrived n the mail.
Two really fine New
Year’s Day selections follow.
William Allingham (1824-89)
The
first is from William Allingham, an Irish poet best known for his poem The
Fairies ("Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen/We
daren't go a-hunting/For fear of little men..."), his literary
friendships, and his posthumously published Diaries (1905).
February 1, 1867 [London]
"Tennyson is unhappy from his uncertainty
regarding the condition and destiny of man.
Is it is dispiriting to find a great poet with no better grounds of
comfort than a common person? At first
it is. But how should the case be
otherwise? The poet has only the same
materials of sensation and thought as ordinary mortals; he uses them better;
but to step outside the human limitations is not granted even to him. The secret is kept from one and all of us. We must turn eyes and
thoughts to the finer and nobler aspects of things, and never let the scalpel
of Science overbear pen, pencil and plectrum. A Poet’s doubts and anxieties are more
comforting than a scientist’s certainties and equanimities."
George Templeton Strong (1820-75)
The
second, dated ten years earlier, is from George Templeton Strong’s famous Diaries, which were discovered in the 1930s and offer
a vivid, charged, and highly personal account of 19th century life. They are
especially valued for their information and observations regarding Civil
War-related events, as seen from a Union perspective.
Strong was a New York City lawyer (he was
associated with the predecessor firm of the venerable Cadawalader Wickersham
and Taft) and diarist, and his voluminous (2,250 pages) diary has been compared
by the historian Paula Baker to Mary Boykin Chesnut’s parallel southern account
of this period, “A Diary From Dixie”.
Strong’s pre-Civil War description of
life in Manhattan excerpted here paints what seems (from this former
prosecutor's perspective) like a contemporary picture of New York City or,
especially lately, Philadelphia life.
February 1, 1857 [New York]
'An epidemic of crime this winter. ‘Garrotting ‘ stories abound, some true, some
no doubt fictitious, devised to explain the absence of one’s watch and
pocketbook after a secret visit to some disreputable place, or to put a good
face on some tipsy street fracas. But a
tradesman was attacked the other
afternoon in broad daylight at his own shop door in the Third Avenue near
Thirteenth Street by a couple of men, one of whom
was caught, and will probably get his deserts in the State prison, for life –
the doom of two of the fraternity already tried and sentenced. Most of my friends are investing in revolvers
and carry them about at night, and if I expect to have to do a great deal of
late street-walking off Broadway, I think I should make the like provision;
though it’s a very bad practice carrying concealed weapons. Moreover, there was an uncommonly shocking
murder in Bond Street (No. 31) Friday night; one Burdell, a dentist, strangled
and riddled with stabs in his own room by some person unknown who must have
been concealed in the room. Motive
unknown, evidently not plunder."
Happy New Year!
