Is it just me, or is it always a bit strange at the start of another year? As if you can feel the earth and the sky and the ambience of things shifting wearily into another gear with a here-we-go-again crunching of cosmic cogs.
There’s a novel by Thomas Hardy called Two on a Tower in which a young man named Swithin decides to visit the small rural church in which he will be married the next day. At dusk he enters the silent church, rejoicing in visions of the morrow. But Hardy, in that sleeve-twitching way of his, directs the reader’s gaze to the floor. And there we see flagstones worn concave by the thousands who had preceded Swithin, buoyed with the same hopes and plans and anticipated joys and, by implication, disappointed. Happy laughing Tom Hardy was merely, as he put it, trying to demonstrate how ‘infinitesimal (are our) lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe’—a truth which, no doubt, we could do without most of the time.
It does require considerable personal, imaginative deception to convince yourself that anything genuinely new is going down as the year gets under way again. That’s why New Year’s resolutions almost invariably fail. Too soon the euphoria that fuelled the lie about ‘new’ wears off and you realise that nothing’s changed really and resolve of whatever kind will have to survive the same old quotidian assaults that were so persistent and insurmountable last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. And so you inexorably approach the what-the-hell stage of the new year and before you know it you’re back at work, the holidays are over, winter’s on the way and—is that sniffle the first sign of flu? The explanation of this annual return to unwanted realities, it may surprise you to know, is the second law of thermodynamics.
Which states, in brief, that entropy proceeds in a closed system; or, to put it in a way you and I can follow: things fall apart. Everything is slowly decaying, degenerating. So, if you neglect your lawn, it runs to seed. If you don’t look after your car, it rusts. Paint peels, joints open, tiles shift, pipes clog. Why, you might ask—and I ask this myself, frequently—don’t things improve if you leave them alone. Given the option of improving or getting worse, why do they always go bad?
For example,