Of course it’s random, those calendar days, if you were Chinese, or Persian or Jewish, you would celebrate your New Year on a different day and then sit and think about how the past year was. We just do it at the darkest time of the year, which may not really help with assessment. Or is it the years themselves, whenever you gauge them, that no longer contribute to an enjoyable look back? We can consider this a rhetorical question. It is also not about judging events over which you had little or no influence.
Then your own life. I received a letter from someone who noted with dismay that people are terrible, and that is true, and it would be a coincidence if I was just now a favorable exception to that. Although there are favorable exceptions, as the letter writer fortunately noted. These exceptions are often the heroes of this world, the people who provide help where it is needed, doctors who operate under terrible conditions, someone who has acted decisively without paying attention to themselves, well, anyone can think of them. And anyone can look at such people, the great people, and feel that they themselves are falling short. It’s not difficult at all to beat yourself up about it.
I don’t think it makes much sense either. It makes you feel dejected and then. Then you are dejected.
On the other hand, some self-examination can do no harm. I read it more than a month ago (because I ran to the store as soon as the book arrived) Until everything starts moving by Ester Naomi Perquin. A stunning book. Her main character points out all kinds of events and episodes in her life, and she does this when everything starts to move because she is having or has had a daughter. The episodes have to do with men, very different ones, and with herself in response to those men. That’s where the special thing is. She’s fed up with herself the way she was. The main character is a writer about true crime and she can no longer hear herself when she gives lectures and talks about what she knows about all kinds of gruesome crimes in that delicately introduced yet distant tone, with a joke here and there. Because she doesn’t actually tell us what she really knows. “(…) everything I do meets both other people’s and my own needs to stay out of harm’s way.”
Not in this book.
Honesty is perhaps the hardest thing there is
Honesty is perhaps the hardest thing there is. Not because you necessarily want to lie, but because it is not that easy to know where to look. Stories easily lend a helping hand: that’s how it was, that’s why it happened and there you are again. ‘Out of shot.’
I think that realization is one of the motivations for people to pray, to place themselves opposite, let me call it a loving eye, that divine agency that would see everything. Who would know you and yet not reject you.
Sometimes you are such an authority yourself, as a reader, for example, of a book like Perquin’s, more often of poetry, in which someone brings out what is private by no longer leaving it private but by giving it a form.
Prayer is even more intimate. I read the book that Willem Jan Otten wrote about it very recently, Amen it’s called and it gives a lot of thoughts. Not so much about falling short, that’s what we do, but about what kind of person you are and want to be. This year. Now and always.
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