A cultural guide to new year’s resolutions
“Every man hath two birth-days," proclaimed Charles Lamb, a Romantic essayist, in 1821: his personal one and New Year’s Day. “It is that from which all date their time," Lamb wrote, “and count upon what is left". The turn of the year was an occasion to “encounter pell-mell with past disappointments".
But it was also a prompt to look forward to the years that remained to him, which seemed to pass ever more quickly. This one-two of retrospection and encroaching mortality often leads to self-reproach—for hours wasted, love undeclared and careless cruelties—and thence to vows for the future. Lamb’s was to squeeze life dry (and have another cup of wine).
Collectively, he and other writers and storytellers offer a handy typography of new year’s resolutions, virtuous and violent, kept and otherwise. Booze is a central theme, either as the subject of the resolution or the spur for it. At the close of 1661, for instance, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary that he had sworn a “solemn oath" to abstain from wine.
He did for a few weeks, finding he spent less money and frittered away less time “in idle company". But he couldn’t keep it up and by February was hitting the bottle again. Likewise the heroine of “Bridget Jones’s Diary" resolves to drink less and “stop talking total nonsense to strangers".
She struggles on both counts. In her case and others, drinking lubricates another type of resolution, namely an intent to find love. Like Christmas, only with more ambient smooching, New Year’s Eve is a lonely time for singletons.
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