In one year and out the other
31st December often holds a note of finality, like the lingering autumn leaves on a tree or the splendid final chord of a symphony – though they are just like any other leaf or chord, their arbitrarily determined chronology lends them a special significance that we are more than willing to pounce upon as a marker in the shapeless linearity of time. As the year draws to a close then, we feel that this day, a little more extraordinary than the rest should be one to cherish, like a enduring handshake before a parting. One may look back, misty-eyed, upon the events of the year past, a compartmentalised segment of time, or to nobly gape at the foggy recesses of the future.
Indeed, the closing of a year usually inspires such prudish sentimentality, such as this, with talk of bracing oneself for the unknown, steeled by the lessons of the year, serious head-nodding and expressionless contemplation when, any other date might have been suitable. This ridicules the very idea of distinctive "New Year's" parties, as the express significance of the date does not make it any more worth celebrating than any other day. The very concept of "New Year" is very much a Western invention and a symbol of our piety to the past and to the orthodoxy. The keeping of time and its related technicalities are very much an issue close to human civilisation and its development so far. The system we have now is the numbered ball that has popped out of a lottery randomiser – chosen arbitrarily through chance and physics. This however is a rather poor excuse for launching into the justification that the new year (no point giving it more emphasis than it already needs) barely scratches the surface of this issue:
Every day — and every moment of every day — is the start of a new year, because it is always exactly one year away from a corresponding moment one year previously. Of course, this rather academic view is echoed by the quote from American Beauty, that "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."
If one wants to count in years, why do so in years of 365 or 366 days? This irrational convention arises in deference to the Sun. The Sun mattered then because it regulated the sequence of the seasons on which farming depended. Probably, therefore, the Sun became the arbiter of the length of years only when people started agriculture: in the span of human history, this makes it a recent event.
In the ancient times, carrying over till now in the Chinese and Islamic calendars, most timekeeping was lunar. The Moon’s machinations echo rhythms of the body: the menstrual cycle and our sequence of sleep and wakefulness. Some human groups keep star-time, usually on the basis of a cycle of Venus. Ancient Mesoamericans observed a 260-day sacred year, in tribute to the rough correspondence of the term of a pregnancy to the passage of Venus.
Nature, it can be seen, often dictates the means by which we measure time. More eminent civilisations utilised the celestial bodies for their greater prominence and regularity. But some cultures have never done so and relied on making comparisons between linear sequences of events. The Nuer of the Sudan use the growth rate of cattle. A famine, war or pestilence might be remembered as occurring “when my calf was so high”.
For us in industrial and post-industrial societies, these have lost any significance they might once have had. In 1896, the discovery of constant, regular radioactive emissions gave us a universally valid way of measuring time independently of all sidereal bodies. The official global standard of time is now the average rate of radiation emitted by atoms of caesium-133 in 200 oscillators.
We can divide up the inaudible and ceaseless footfall of time as we please, and such is the way that we have chosen to do so. Officially, it makes everything neater and more methodical. Philosophically, it is much more convenient to think of things chronologically, tidily organised like objects in cardboard boxes in a mover's truck. 31st December might just be like 1st January, but I think we can all still exercise the right to some self-delusion in penning out our resolutions and seeing out the year either in quietude or heavy drinking. Had I not thought so, I would already have gone to bed instead of waiting for the little rush that accompanies the clock ticking down to zero.
