გილოცავთ ახალ წელს *

For some of us, by no means all of us, presently magnetised by the gravity of this spinning globe, it is the end of another year. Happy New Year, we say freely. Sretna Nova Godina. Godt Nytår. Bonne Année. Is-Sena T-Tajba. Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku. Blwyddyn Newydd Dda. С Новым Годом. สวัสดีปีใหม่. And yet we never really think about what a year is. Except perhaps in terms of its relationship to ourselves. It is fascinating therefore for ignorant people such as myself to be reminded of the fact that a year is really just the period of time during which the planet, earth in our case, completes a single revolution around the sun. Like a kind of Icarus flying in the opposite direction, we are so adept these days at getting away from the big picture. I suppose another pertinent thing about this time of year which separates it from the rest of the year is this appetite for resolutions we have, and it is perhaps interesting therefore that we are forever preoccupied with what it is that we are going to give up and seldom in what it is we might wish to take up. It is as if our view of ourselves is governed entirely by a rich vein of self-indulgence. There is also the equally troubling difference, is there not, between the year's end as translated by our personal year and the often more fierce year as seen through more global eyes. (I fear the burden of empathy has it that I am as much caught up in my mind with the latter as the former, which is to say a far greater ache. Indeed, if only I could be more selfish, I sometimes think, I would be a far more successful man.) No, regarding the global, I cannot say with any real confidence that the world is in a better state now than it was a year ago. Can you? All right, there are all manner of statistics available to disprove this view, but there would be wouldn't there? Especially with all these statisticians tumbling like large boxes of unexplained facts off the statistics conveyor belt at universities and colleges these days. Scatterplots. Discrete probability distributions. Examples of constructing confidence intervals. (72% of all statisticians write in an extraordinary language don't you think?) But what of this naturally selfish take on a year? (How did I do? How was I?) What are or will be the consequences? If it's any help, I was walking alongside a small and muddy river with the less coughful artist these days an hour or so ago and we were talking precisely about how people view themselves. We both agreed - in that possibly harsh and sometimes unfair way of ours - that any such form of smugness or self-pleasure is tantamount to a kind of little death, and a blight therefore on the chances of a living and breathing culture. Still ... a Happy New Year to one and all. Or Naya Saal Mubarik, as they say in the land of the peppered people carrier. Let's make it a good one.
*Gilocavt Akhal Tsels, Georgian: "Happy New Year"