Gilded youth see the New Year in (New York, 2012)
Events that occur but once a year–-birthdays
and wedding anniversaries being the most notorious–-are probably occasions of
what might be called necessary reflection. For the better part of three decades, with occasional off
years when we were living abroad, we have celebrated the advent of the New Year
in the company of a group of long married couples who are also close personal
friends. All the men were professional faculty colleagues at Princeton. It was a kind of movable feast in slow
motion, as we moved about from house to house. There were originally five couples, with a sixth soon added,
making a large dinner party of a dozen.
But as fast as the years move on,
people often move faster yet. Soon enough our group experienced the inevitable
mutations attendant upon increasing age and eminence. One couple went off to inhabit the presidential mansion of a
famous university in the South.
Another (I will call them “the musicians”) moved to exciting new
positions in New York. Then,
shockingly soon as it seemed, people began retiring. One couple went back to their New England roots in rural New
Hampshire. The university
president has now taken up permanent residence on Martha’s Vineyard. Another eminence went off to
Harvard. Of the original New Year
Dinner Club couples only one other now remains in the area, and this particular
year they were visiting a daughter in China. Sic transit gloria
mundi. Things change, as
Tennyson puts it, “lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
Thus it was that on Saturday we
went up to Greenwich Village to have dinner at the marvelous abode of our
“musicians” in the company of three other of their musical friends. It was a mellow evening, but it ended about
ten forty-five when the seven of us arrived at the mellow decision that we were
sufficiently venerable to waive any implicit requirement to stay up to hear the
midnight roar from Times Square.
(It is, however, an interesting acoustical fact, personally experienced
at the turn of the millennium, that the Times Square roar is heard loudly in
southern Manhattan.)
New Year’s Eve should belong to the
young, as one is quite sure that it does if one takes a train into the city in
the early afternoon. Many of the
more forward-looking youth are already preemptively intoxicated by the time
they get on at Metro Park. Which
makes it all the stranger that the evening’s canonical anthem is “Auld Lang
Syne,” a song that is not
ethically singable by people under the age of fifty. Concerning this song I know considerably more than I did a
week ago, for we spent a couple of hours of our sober New Year’s Eve afternoon at
the Morgan Library working up an appetite for our Darby-and-Joan dinner party.
Darby and Joan see the New Year in (anywhere, anytime)
Readers familiar with this
delightful venue will know that there is on the ground floor, across from glass
box elevators, a single exhibition room ideal for showcasing the carefully
defined literary collections that are one of the library’s specialties. Not too long ago they had a splendid
display of Miltoniana, including the Charles Ryskamp Milton portrait. The highly topical exhibit of the
moment is “Robert Burns and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.” The Morgan curators had laid it all out: original
manuscript, autograph letters, contracts with publishers, musical settings—the
whole lot. So I am now prepared to
announce as proven facts a number of suspicions I have long harbored concerning
“Auld Lang Syne”, to wit:
1.
Auld lang
syne is a meaningful phrase in no known ancient or modern language or
dialect, least of all the Northumbrian dialect of English known to the
unlettered as “Scots”. It shares
the status of the imaginary “English” one frequently sees on the tee-shirts
worn by teen-agers in Barcelona or Civitavecchia, the product of the resident
linguists in Chinese sweatshops: “Baby Happy,” “Cool Frisk,” etc.
2.
Burns was fibbing outrageously when he claimed
to have transcribed the song as sung by some toothless old gaffer crooning on
the heath amid the heather. He
obviously made the whole thing up.
3.
“Auld lang syne” is a perfectly atrocious
poem. And…
4.
“Auld lang syne” is therefore the perfect song
to be sung by those who do not wish to remember having done so even so soon as twelve
hours later.
The Burns holograph currently on display at the Morgan Library
Particularly acute are the second and third verses. However, since I know that there are more people—three, by actual scientific count--who know the second and third verses of the “Star-Spangled Banner” than there are of those who know the second and third verses of “Auld Lang Syne,” I take the liberty of supplying them for you.
With this I wish the happiest of
possible new years to all my readers.
May your gowan-pulling be joyous and your burn-paddling moist.
