I feel a real thrill at the prospect of making a New Year’s resolution. While usually inclined toward maintaining my set routine, I remain vulnerable to the countervailing compulsion to rearrange my life, as some are drawn to rearranging the furniture every couple of months. Even the common varieties of vague and Protestant resolution stir something in me. Cook more, eat vegetarian, cut the processed sugar, cut the booze, hit the gym, walk a mile a day; I’m not a fan of the misery and the defeat and, worst of all, the society that makes people suffer for their bodies, yet the idea of experimenting with the way I live persists. Also, I am always eager to hear from someone who has made a resolution because, to my mind, they are setting off on a kind of adventure.
I have a history of resolutions — New Year’s and otherwise. As a graduate student in Montreal I spent a year exclusively reading books written by women. Another year I read the news exclusively in French. Lent 2017, now living in Israel, I ignored the news entirely. In 2020 I started listening to a slow French news podcast every day, and I succeeded until the national lock-down was declared. That resolution was less failed, more redundant. While half the world was planning on Duolingo-ing their way through their confinement, I realized that my resolution had become superfluous. Like it or not, the entire world’s collective furniture was being rearranged. I no longer had to worry about breaking up my own routines or trying out a new way to live. Not when going to the supermarket became a surreal and uncertain experience. Not when the pandemic began to change the way we dreamed.
The desire to find a different way to live is tightly coupled with a prurient interest in the way other people live. Praise be then to those brave voyagers reporting back to us with their experiences and collected wisdom via You-tube. They have tried doing 100 press-ups a day, 100 crunches a day, and 100 squats a day. They have tried reading 100 pages a day, writing 1000 words a day, and writing a novel in a month. You can find them quitting smoking, vaping, drinking, coffee, sugar, gluten, video games, world of warcraft specifically, social media, and the internet. You can find them trying meat for the first time, playing magic the gathering for the first time, watching a BTS music video for the first time, a kitten seeing snow for the first time, Amish girls seeing an airport for the first time, and Koreans trying bourbon for the first time. People have will tell you how they found eating like Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Christiano Ronaldo, Adele, Michael Phelps, and The Rock. There are people who try, and debate the merits of, military rations from across the world.
To my mind, we (and especially these Youtubers) are all the descendants of Henry David Thoreau, the New England writer, proto-naturalist, proto-activist, and abolitionist. From July 1845 to September 1847 Thoreau lived apart from his town and community, working with his hands, in a cottage on the edge of Walden pond. His written account of the experiment was published almost seven years later so we can, as the expression goes, read all about it — from growing beans to visiting town every once in a while. But he also explains his motivations — principally, a deep cynicism about the lives of the men around him. He saw them “digging their graves before they are born” and living under the tyranny of their own opinions of themselves.
Walden – Thoreau
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.
It is not easy to transpose a thinker of the past into current circumstances. If Thoreau was alive today I can’t be sure if we’d find him vlogging about polyamory, a mid level marketing scheme, or radical politics. Quite possibly all of the above. I doubt that he would be the kind of person to play the incredibly sincere looking video game adaptation of his book.
In lieu of Thoreau, we have the likes of the Try Guys, who arrived on the video landscape with a four minute report on wearing women’s underwear for the first time.
You cannot watch such a video of those young men and not acknowledge that they are bucking against the tyranny of their own opinions of themselves. And having glanced through all these videos of people trying, quitting, warning and advising I suspect there is also the underlying cynicism about the way we live our lives that reflects something of Thoreau as well.
So what is my own new years resolution? As a teenager I read a book whose title and precise nature has faded from memory, but what I do remember is that the author, by way of illustrating some other point, briefly described spending a year reading the complete works of Shakespeare. At first, he recounted, it was difficult going, trying to soldier on through all that pentameter. But with perseverance the language opened up and he developed an authentic appreciation of the plays. It was far neater experience than I would today grant credence to, but it struck me at the time as a deeply worthy thing to do. I know for a fact, however, that I would not be able to read that much Shakespeare in a year. Aside from anything else, I am generally committed to reading wherever my fancy takes me. Instead, and by way of trying to get some Shakespeare into my system, I will commit myself to devoting each year to a different play. And I will begin, in 2022, with Macbeth.