Not long ago, I was listening to an interview held with the late Harold Bloom, the brilliant, prolific, and provocative literary critic and Yale Sterling Professor of the Humanities. Bloom’s puckish oeuvre of declarations includes “I have limped off so many cultural battlefields that I increasingly feel like my heroes in The Iliad, who do their fighting . . . in order to exchange armor.” But this twenty-five-year-old conversation surrounding his book How to Read and Why found the aging (and ailing) Bloom a bit more wistful. When asked by his interlocutor which words might be in his mind or on his lips as he draws his last breath, Bloom paused, grimaced with a “How would I hope to know that?” look, and then offered a melancholic recitation of A. E. Housman’s poem A Shropshire Lad, XL.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
It was beautiful. And sad.
The fortieth (XL) of a sixty-three poem collection, A Shropshire Lad is a pining poem. It reflects warmly of things that were, yet dolefully of things that will never be again. It soothes the heart momentarily before it causes it to ache. It is the essence of bittersweet.
Such is life: an intricate mosaic of certainty and mystery, hope and regret, cheer and melancholy, love and loss.
But to capture the same complex poignancy, Bloom might just as well have reached for another poem. William Butler Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree gently ushers us back to a boyhood cabin with its “clay and wattles made,” “bee-loud glade,” and “evening full of linnet’s wings.” And yet our reverie ends far removed from such an idyll: “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Yeats traps us in a soulless urban landscape. We are at once comforted by memory, but dislocated from it.
Likewise, Robert Frost’s well-known The Road Not Taken wistfully reminds us of the thrill of life’s choices paired with the sorrow of their irreversibility.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Frost never confesses whether the difference was good—just different. It seems therein is the game of joys, regrets, and unanswerable what-ifs. But such is life: an intricate mosaic of certainty and mystery, hope and regret, cheer and melancholy, love and loss. It is, in a word, bittersweet.
On New Year’s Eve, millions sing what has become the anthem of transition: Auld Lang Syne.
Should old acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot
In the days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear
For auld lang syne
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet
For the sake of auld lang syne
Robert Burns’s Scottish folk song is a reflection of the joy and heartache that comes from considering “auld lang syne”—that is, “old long since.” On that last day of the year, what begins as an evening of drinking, ball dropping, and resolution crafting ends with a song that remembers kindly, yet aches a little. And when the confetti lands, the buzz resolves, and the last night becomes the next day, we all feel that ache a little more keenly; it is an unremitting incompleteness. A new day on the calendar, we reluctantly discover, does not mark unalloyed freshness. Again, it is bittersweet.
But this is as it should be.
To look forward, we must look back. And, whether we like it or not, we are formed not only by the instructive experiences we once had, but by the pangs of lost joy, misremembered good, and irreplaceable moments that came with them. To be sure, to miss something good is not to wallow. Rather, it is to acknowledge that something was indeed good. And, naturally, we hunger for its return, if not in a different form.
This craving for the bygone is a hunger for heaven—the eternal, the ineffable—while living in a broken world.
In many ways, this craving for the bygone is a hunger for heaven—the eternal, the ineffable—while living in a broken world. Our ache originates in our dislocation. Or as G. K. Chesterton asserted,
The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.
So if you feel a certain vexing bittersweetness at the turning of the year, you are not alone. It is as it should be. And it will all be okay. To assuage some of it, pray, receive the Eucharist, and give alms. But also,: simply embrace it—the joy of the past along with the heartache. As Rainer Maria Rilke once advised,
Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.
I can still hear Harold Bloom’s soft voice finishing,
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
And I feel the pang too.
May you have a blessed and bittersweet New Year.