New Year’s is an impoverished holiday, but it is also a cheerful one. Most people are happy to welcome the new year. The rest are happy to be rid of the old one. Far from undermining this cheerfulness, the holiday’s impoverishment increases it. New Year’s is a customary day off, without customary obligations to visit, give gifts, decorate, or have a feast. This comes, hard on the heels of Christmas, like a reprieve.
There is one poverty that we could alleviate without creating the burden of obligation: the lack of New Year’s stories. There are, by a conservative estimate, one million Christmas specials, movies, novels, and themed episodes. Some of them are even good. A few are icons of American culture. All the New Year has, in terms of art, is “Auld Lang Syne.”
New Year’s should have a story. What is more, it can. J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle” would fill the gap admirably. Niggle is a man who must take a long journey, and an artist (in a humble way) who would like to finish his painting first. He procrastinates his preparations for the journey, and sets off like a beggar, with almost nothing. He putters about the work of his painting, and leaves with it still unfinished.
A kind of tribunal is held along his journey. A Voice observes, “Look at the time he wasted, not even amusing himself!” And so he did.
Time, however, had its revenge. When the Driver came to collect Niggle for his journey, Niggle wept over his painting: “It’s not even finished!” The Driver answered, truly but brutally: “Well, it’s finished with, as far as you’re concerned, at any rate.” But no one else was much concerned with the painting, or with Niggle himself, and Time plowed both under, in the remorseless way in which Time plows under everything.
“I wasted time,” laments Shakespeare’s Richard II, “and now doth time waste me.” It is the fault, and the punishment, of all of us. Niggle knew it as well as the conquered king.
Yet the journey that erased Niggle from his old country carried him into a new country. Much is to be learned there, and much to be found. “Leaf by Niggle” is a story of the redemption of time – the time that we waste, and the time that wastes us.
And that is why it is a superlative New Year’s story.
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