Each New Year’s Eve, the approach to midnight fills me with a sort of… I’m not sure of the right word: anxiety, trepidation, fear, gravity, something like that.
No, it’s not because I’m concerned that a bullet fired into the air by some too-mindless-and-selfish-to-live yahoo will fall out of the sky and into my head (although, alas, that is not an impossibility); it has to do with the symbolism of the moment. Time is passing, and the new beginning we give ourselves on January 1st, with all its annual promise, will be over in a year’s time, will have become past. And all that will have been transpired in my life will have been up to me (plus dumb luck, and a little help from my friends). Knowing that task begins in 10, 9, 8, 7… I feel its weight. A year’s worth of responsibility, starting in 3, 2, 1…
Jean-Paul Sartre says that we are free. He does not mean politically, but that we have free will, and that there is no world or gods behind the scene determining what transpires here; we alone are responsible, each of us individually—and, since we are herd animals, how our actions add up collectively.1 And he argues that the main reason most people reject this notion is because acknowledging that degree of freedom, accepting self-determination, is a heavy burden to bear. As Albert Camus writes so poignantly in The Fall: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”
Of course, a lot of people are much more optimistic about life in general than I am.2 A lot of people don’t think about these things, while many others look to the unknown and the future only with anticipation, excitement. But the pessimism native to where I’m coming from isn’t really what I’m talking about when I speak of the feelings I’ll be having as 2010 draws to a close here on the West Coast. Right now I’m focusing only on the responsibility that we all share in creating the ever-evolving present that will continue through midnight and through all of 2011. As Karl Marx wrote3 in 1845:
History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
Part of what inspired me to write this column is recently having come across some black-and-white photographs of the Long Beach of yesteryear: a drag strip, people surfing, the harbor during World War II. The same truth that held in the century between Marx and the breakwater has held in the half-century since Bob Dylan came on the scene and the half-dozen years since I came to Long Beach: the times they are a-changin’, but the times and the change is only us.
I love Long Beach, but its geography, etc., is the tiniest part of that love. I never was the kind of person who loved a football team because of its tradition, uniform, or location; I only care about the players, the people of who comprise it. I love Long Beach because of the people in the here and now, the ones closing out 2010 with me, the ones who will determine what Long Beach is in 2011, the ones who a century hence will all be dead and gone, and who will have created the then-fixed set of facts that 22nd-century historians and anthropologists will piece together and interpret.
As a wish and exhortation, I say to you all: happy new year. Let’s make it so, because we get one shot at 2011, and a year from now our chance will have past.
That’s a heavy responsibility. But we’ve no choice: the weight is ours to bear, together.
Footnotes
1Sartre would not deny the influence of exogenous factors (e.g., natural disasters—the kinds of thing shaded by my umbrella of “dumb luck”), nor did he reject relatively deterministic factors outside of our control (such as the genetic makeup that meant I would never play in the NBA); he would simply say these are beside the point, and that each of us exercise our freedom within certain parameters.
2God knows being more of an optimist than I am does not take much.
3In The Holy Family, though I got it via John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (which I rather enjoyed. Thanks, Asya!).