The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
January 1, 2025
It is no surprise that the Romans invented January 1st in 46 BCE as the first day of the year. And the New Year’s Eve that we know, with the ball dropping, first happened in New York City in 1907. I usually throw a glass of white wine against the living room wall to mark it as a special time. New Year’s Eve and Day is a series of moments where I reflect on the past and what I should do in the future. I usually come to the conclusion that I should focus on the present and be aware of past mistakes, but I should also be mindful that one can never know the future.
Today, I took a walk, did 10,000 steps, and went to my local used bookstore, Alias Books East on Glendale Blvd. in Atwater Village. I found a book I have been looking for for a while now. Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Up To Me is a novel that is very much part of the 1960s counter-culture. Fariña was a friend of both Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan and married Joan Baez’s little sister, Mimi. The novel is very much of its time and not easy to find second-hand. It can be a pricey devil if found, but I got my copy for $12.50 and in good shape. I went to the Black Elephant cafe down the street, ordered a Peanut Butter Lotte, and started to read the book. Thomas Pynchon’s introduction sets the book in time and place, and I can imagine that he and Fariña were college pals, checking out the chicks on the campus. It dawned on me that the Sixties was not the beginning but the end of a particular type of male cultural dominance that is still with us today. Endings, at times, take a long time to die.
The Fariña book is a good snapshot of literature written and produced in the 1960s. It is a time capsule that seems to breathe its own air, not 2025. Pynchon's novels, such as V. and Rainbow's Gravity, were also very much part of the culture when they were written, compared to his works that deal with history (Against the Day/Mason & Dickson/Vineland/Inherent Vice). As usual, as I come upon a new year, I focus on the past instead of the present, but then again, what is present, and what is past? As William Faulkner commented in his novel Requiem for a Nun (1951), The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
My plans for 2025 are to finish reading the two last volumes by Marcel Proust from In Search of Lost Time and read 100 books; Good Reads is very kind to keep track of my reading titles. My other goals for 2025 are to remain alive and write more. Happy New Year.
I love Richard, his brief writing career and songs, and also his sister.
As I understand it, the date was in honour of the Roman god Janus, deity of new beginnings, and after attempts were later made my medieval Christians to replace it with more significant (to them) dates, Pope Gregory XIII revised the calendar into the Gregorian one, restoring Jan. 1 as the beginning of the year. It used to be April, and many stubborn people continued to insist on celebrating that as the new year, thus earning the name April fools. Ain't history a hoot?