Anno Domini

Last night I was preparing to drive home from a family get-together. It was about nine degrees F and very fine metallic snow was falling, or refalling, I'm not certain. I was thinking of Mitya's dream of the cold people in despair: Why don't they hug each other and kiss? Why don't they sing songs of joy? And there was the possible key to why people on the North American analogue of the steppe stay up late on New Year's Eve: to celebrate their sociality, to stand against the cold and dark and not take cover and dream of hibernation when to be awake and festive is counterintuitive. It isn't even that the wakeful mock the night--there is no emnity, only the opposition of life, the contradiction that creates and keeps.