Friday, December 30, 2005
(9:16 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: And so this is New Year's
I confess that I derive a certain satisfaction from the thought that a likely origin of the use of "Happy Holidays" as a late-December greeting seems to be the desire to refer to both Christmas and New Year's.
I confess that when I read 9/11 "conspiracy theory" type of stuff (i.e., that the US government had a direct hand in some of the destruction and allowed some of the rest to happen), I find it to be really plausible and I am filled with despair. I confess that it's pretty cool that a theologian, David Griffin, has written two books on the subject.
I confess that it's beginning to look as though the tasks I have set myself for January might be physically impossible to achieve in one month, to wit:
- Finish the Nancy part of my Agamben/Nancy study
- Read The Parallax View (of which I have already received an advance copy) and write two reviews
- Start learning Latin
- Work kind of a lot
- Revise and send off my paper for the Nietzsche/Kierkegaard class -- that also involves sitting down among the journals for a few hours to see which ones would be appropriate venues for the kind of work I'm doing.
And now, at this solemn time of year, we turn and reflect on our failings and vices. In the discarded calendar we see a potent symbol of the self we have been, and in the fresh calendar placed upon the wall we see the potential of what we could be. It is fitting, then, that we make resolutions, because even if we fail to fulfill the particular resolution we have made, our resolve in itself testifies to the ever-present possibility of change -- and our failure to live up to the resolution testifies to the unpredictable nature of such change. Calling to mind all of this, I hereby make a proper and holy New Year's Resolution: In 2006, I shall gain a reading knowledge of Latin.
