This year, 2020, and to a smaller extent its successor, 2021, have clarified a concept in my mind: Years are not people. Artistic personifications show up in broadcast and print, in news, entertainment and advertising during the last few days of each year, ostensibly to remind us of rebirth and renewal — an adorable, diapered Baby New Year crawling in, and their decrepit cohort shuffling toward Oblivion Acres Retirement Home. This is not a new thing, it seems. They make a quaint image, but, I have realized, a very broken metaphor.
Try this: Imagine the one person who, for better or for worse, has come to personify 2020 for you. (They do not have to be someone you came to know of on January first of the year, as my problem with the metaphor is not with the year’s arrival but its departure.) You have, mentally or emotionally, spent the majority of the year with this person. Ok. Now, imagine that, at the stroke of midnight on December 31st, this person would disappear from your life, and would not be able to affect you any more — ever — whether this thought is pleasant or painful.
That finality you just imagined? That is not what happens when the year changes. “Of course it’s not,” you may be thinking now. But even though, put so plainly, it seems obvious to the point of inanity, we still use the New Year as a magical turning point: “New Year, New You” and all that magical-thinking piffle. This year’s changeover especially, so many of us are joyously and vigorously good-riddanceing 2020, as though the change of that last digit will somehow work a miracle…
Mr. 2020 has not left the building. I don’t think any years ever do leave completely. Just because 2020 is not in charge of the barbecue anymore doesn’t mean his racist jokes and litter aren’t plaguing the party.
Having pooh-poohed the year-personified concept, however, I am hard-pressed to come up with a replacement… Any ideas?