Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”
The season is at hand when Time throws his annual challenge in our teeth. The bell tinkles peremptorily and a calendar is thrust upon us. November is still young when we are dragged upon the threshold of another year. The leisurely dismissal of the old year is no longer possible; we may indulge in no lingering good-bye, but the old fellow hustles out in haste, with apologetic, shrinking step and we slam the door upon him. It is off with the old love and on with the new, whether we will or no. I solemnly protest against the invasion of the calendar. In an age that boasts of freedom, I rebel against a tyrant who comes merely to warn us of the fugitive character of Time; for that sharp elbow in the ribs has prodded many a noble soul to his death. These pretty devices that we are asked to hang upon our walls are the seductive advertisements of an insinuating and implacable foe. We are asked to be particeps criminis in his hideous trade, for must I not tear off and cast as rubbish to the void a day, a week, a month, that I may not have done with at all? Why, may I ask, should I throw my yesterdays into the waste-basket? Yet if I fail, falling only a few leaves behind, is not my shameless inefficiency and heedlessness paraded before the world? How often have I delivered myself up to my enemies by suffering April to laugh her girlish laughter through torrid July? I know well the insinuating smile of the friend who, dropping in on a peaceful morning, when Time, as far as I am concerned, has paused in the hay-field to dream upon his scythe handle, walks coolly to the calendar and brings me up to date with a fine air of rebuke, as though he were conferring the greatest favor in the world. I am sure that I should have no standing with my neighbors if they knew that I rarely wind my watch and that the clocks in my house, save one or two that are kept going merely to avoid explanations, are never wound.
There is a gentle irony in the fact that the most insolent dispensers of calendars are the life insurance companies. It is a legitimate part of their nefarious game: you and I are their natural prey, and if they can accent for us the mortality of the flesh by holding up before us, in compact form, the slight round of the year, they are doing much to impress upon us the appalling brevity of our most reasonable expectancy. How weak we are to suffer the intimidation of these soulless corporations, who thrust their wares upon us as much as to say, “Here’s a new year, and you’d better make the most of it, for there’s no saying when you will get another.” You, my friend, with your combined calendar and memorandum always before you, may pledge all your to-morrows if you will; but as for me the Hypocritic Days, the Barefoot Dervishes, may ring my bell until they exhaust the battery without gaining a single hour as my grudging alms.
We are all prone to be cowards, and to bend before the tyrant whose banner is spread victoriously on all our walls. Poets and philosophers aid and abet him; the preachers are forever telling us what a dreadful fellow he is, and warning us that if we don’t get on the good side of him we are lost forever,—mere wreckage on a grim, inhospitable shore. Hypocrisy and false oaths are born of such teaching. Januarius, let us remember, was two-faced, and it has come about naturally that New Year’s oaths carry a reserve. They are not, in fact, serious obligations. It is a poor soul that sets apart a certain number of days for rectitude, and I can’t for the life of me see anything noble in making a constable of the calendar. I find with joy that I am freeing myself of the tyrant’s thrall. I am never quite sure of the day of the week; I date my letters yesterday or to-morrow with equal indifference. June usually thrusts her roses into my windows before I change the year in dating my letters. The magazines seem leagued with the calendar for man’s undoing. I sometimes rush home from an inspection of a magazine counter in mad haste to get where Oblivion cannot stretch forth a long, lean arm and pluck me into the eternal shades; for I decline with all the strength of my crude Western nature, to countenance the manufacture of yesterdays, no matter how cheerful they may be, out of my confident to-morrows. A March magazine flung into the teeth of a February blizzard does not fool the daffodils a particle. This stamping of months that have not arrived upon our current literature is nothing more or less than counterfeiting;—or rather, the issuing of false currency by the old Tyrant who stands behind the counter of the Bank of Time. And there is the railway time-table,—the unconscious comic utterance of the Zeitgeist! If the 12.59 is one minute or one hour late, who cares, I wonder? Who am I, pray, that I should stuff my pocket with calendars and time-tables? Why not throw the charts to the fishes and let the winds have their will with us awhile! Let us, I beg, leave some little margin in our lives for the shock of surprise!
The Daughters of Time are charming young persons, and they may offer me all the bread, kingdoms, stars they like; but they must cheer up or keep out of my front yard! No shuffling around, like Barefoot Dervishes; but in golden sandals let them come, and I will kindle a fire of next year’s calendars in their honor. When the snows weigh heavily upon the hills, let us not mourn for yesterday or waste time in idle speculations at the fireside, but address ourselves manfully to the hour’s business. And as some of the phrases of Horace’s ode to Thaliarchus rap for attention in an old file box at the back of my head, I set down a pleasant rendering of them by Mr. Charles Edmund Merrill, Jr.