New Year's Day Diaries (Pen, Pencil, Plectrum)

    We have decided(it was Caroline's suggestion) to consider and celebrate February 1^st as New Year’s Day.

    TraditionalGregorian calendar January 1^st follows Christmas much too closely, andinvariably the Holiday Season  (which we all hope to find enjoyable, but themeasure of joy actually achieved is often in direct proportion to the exhausting effortsmade in its pursuit) and Year both end and begin in a confused and spent state.   


       January is usually a mental and emotionalstruggle, regathering and regrouping, and February’s arrival seems like atwilight respite from a dark, dreamed battle.

    Therefore,around here at least, we’re henceforth assigning to Januarylast-month-of-the-year/ring out the old duties (and thanking its thirty-onedays for allowing one extra moment for clean-up and organization) and Starting Over Today. 

   We believethis system will work much better than the previous one. If last night's New Year's Eve dinner with Jane offers any indication, things augur well for ourfamily and the world. 

 

 

    On Monday (an otherwise rotten day), The Assassin’s Cloak, An Anthology of theWorld’s Greatest Diarists (editors Irene and Alan Taylor, Edinburgh, CanongateBooks, 2000), arrived n the mail.   

    Two really fine NewYear’s Day selections follow.

  

William Allingham (1824-89)

    Thefirst is from William Allingham, an Irish poet best known for his poem TheFairies ("Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen/Wedaren't go a-hunting/For fear of little men..."), his literaryfriendships, and his posthumously published Diaries (1905).   

    February 1, 1867  [London]

       "Tennyson is unhappy from his uncertaintyregarding the condition and destiny of man. Is it is dispiriting to find a great poet with no better grounds ofcomfort than a common person?  At firstit is.  But how should the case beotherwise?  The poet has only the samematerials of sensation and thought as ordinary mortals; he uses them better;but to step outside the human limitations is not granted even to him.  The secret is kept from one and all of us. We must turn eyes andthoughts to the finer and nobler aspects of things, and never let the scalpelof Science overbear pen, pencil and plectrum.   A Poet’s doubts and anxieties are morecomforting than a scientist’s certainties and equanimities."

  

George Templeton Strong (1820-75)

    Thesecond, dated ten years earlier, is from George Templeton Strong’s famous Diaries, which were discovered in the 1930s and offera vivid, charged, and highly personal account of 19^th century life.  They areespecially valued for their information and observations regarding CivilWar-related events, as seen from a Union perspective.  

    Strong was a New York City lawyer (he wasassociated with the predecessor firm of the venerable Cadawalader Wickershamand Taft) and diarist, and his voluminous (2,250 pages) diary has been comparedby the historian Paula Baker to Mary Boykin Chesnut’s parallel southern accountof this period, “A Diary From Dixie”.  

    Strong’s pre-Civil War description oflife in Manhattan excerpted here paints what seems (from this formerprosecutor's perspective) like a contemporary picture of New York City or,especially lately, Philadelphia life.

   February 1, 1857 [New York]

       'An epidemic of crime this winter.  ‘Garrotting ‘ stories abound, some true, someno doubt fictitious, devised to explain the absence of one’s watch andpocketbook after a secret visit to some disreputable place, or to put a goodface on some tipsy street fracas.  But atradesman was attacked the otherafternoon in broad daylight at his own shop door in the Third Avenue nearThirteenth Street by a couple of men, one of whomwas caught, and will probably get his deserts in the State prison, for life –the doom of two of the fraternity already tried and sentenced.  Most of my friends are investing in revolversand carry them about at night, and if I expect to have to do a great deal oflate street-walking off Broadway, I think I should make the like provision;though it’s a very bad practice carrying concealed weapons.  Moreover, there was an uncommonly shockingmurder in Bond Street (No. 31) Friday night; one Burdell, a dentist, strangledand riddled with stabs in his own room by some person unknown who must havebeen concealed in the room.  Motiveunknown, evidently not plunder."

Happy New Year!