The New Year is a holiday born in modernity and is not recorded to have been celebrated en masse in previous societies. There can be many reasons, but I think one of them has to do with the nature of today’s societies, dominated by the quantitative, the superficial, the material. In the quantitative world, an order built by rationality rules, which subjects everything to categorizations and calculations. Modernity rationalizes time and space, what makes them, more objects of calculations than experiences.

In this sense, the celebration of the New Year marks the triumph of the calendar as an instrument of ruling over time and human life itself. Time experienced calendrically lends magic to the stations through which it becomes perceptible, measurable, and manageable. Moments of cyclic fulfillments take on mystical features by themselves, in a completely immanent world stripped of mysticism, spirituality and transcendence. For this reason, something that seems fundamentally meaningless, – to celebrate the completion of a calendar cycle, – takes on meaning in a world stripped of meaning.

The New Year is a holiday that, in itself, is not connected to anything concrete. People celebrate for no real reason and don’t even ask for one. They simply celebrate the arrival of the new year. In a way what is celebrated is time itself and not any object in it, a kind of birthday of the world, defined simply conventionally, under conditions where the world does not and cannot have a birthday.

Interestingly, all this seems to be reinforced by history itself. January 1 is a date in which history does not stop telling us something, whether it is an event or a moment of development that should be remembered or remembered. It seems as if nothing has ever happened on this date, except for the calendar marker, which at a certain moment begins to be celebrated, just like that, without needing to know why and how.

But here another paradox is created. To celebrate time is, in a way, to celebrate its ebb and flow, the annihilation of what is in anticipation of what is to come. We celebrate the coming year, but this is accompanied by the departure of the current year, which logically should bring more sadness than joy. But the paradox becomes normal in a world where the future is itself a cult. Indulging in the future, modern man ignores the fact that the years pass, which makes it possible to forget the fact that our time has a deadline and each new year brings us closer to the end. Despite this, the New Year is celebrated as a triumph of immortality, as the perpetuation of the moment.

The embodiment of the two paradoxes is found in its anecdotal form in the youthful principle of celebrating according to the formula: Until 12 with friends, then with friends. Past and future, old and new, memory and oblivion, soul and body collide here quite innocently and unconsciously on the two faces of a contrastingly halved feast. The last throes of the old year are celebrated in a family way, restrained, near the dearest people while, in the first hours of the new year, the real party begins, rampant outside the home and family warmth, in the hottest temperatures of summer. Under the fireworks when the clock strikes 00:00, two worlds are broken that collide with each other in a society where the family-centered culture is weakening.

Everything is made possible thanks to the consumer culture and its industry of forgetfulness and thoughtlessness that has turned everything upside down. If the holidays themselves are commemorative in nature (related to values ​​and social solidarity), commercial holidays instead simulate oblivion in a procession of the celebration of meaninglessness. Joy is not attached to any object, but becomes a cause of itself and an end in itself. In fact, here joy is converted into amusement, one of the important cults of the culture of oblivion. Consequently, celebrating is equated with having fun, which reduces joy to the empty plot of material.

Above all, the New Year remains a drive that compels us to do something different, even in its very rejection as a celebration. Perhaps the very cyclical nature of time (in spite of the linear time that modernity imposes), hits our consciousness with mile stones, through which we measure our distances from the objects with which we mark the future (whether these plans, expectations or trials and fears), but also objects of the past (events, memories, joys and sorrows). As a result, this holiday can paradoxically also apply to the opposite, as a moment of reflection on what we are, what we do and where we are going.

From this premise, the celebration of the arrival of a new year, stripped of greed and consumerist confusion, can lead us to the opposite shore of a world like this one, emptied of transhedence. It can paradoxically become a means to disconnect a little from our immanence towards a mystical experience over time and the spiritual need for anchoring in eternity.

All we have to do is wish a good year where everyone can find themselves and true joy!

Source: prizrenpost