Janus has been prodding at my backbrain, prompting me to think those classical end-of-year thoughts. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how I’d like 2026 to differ from 2025, both for me personally and in larger ways.
Janus, for those not familiar with the mythology of ancient Rome, was the god of doorways. He was usually depicted as two-faced, one face looking backward and the other looking forward. The passage from one year to the next was especially deemed his kind of transition. I made use of him in Doors:
“Every decision changes us. Even the little ones. And we can’t know beforehand how much.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to cite chaos theory on Christmas Eve,” she said.
“It’s not that so much as the nature of time. Do you know the myth of Janus?”
She shook her head.
“The Roman god of doorways. He had two faces, one facing forward and one facing back. He symbolized choices and transitions. We seldom face a choice knowing everything that will come of making it either way. We can’t avert the consequences of our choices, and we can’t undo them afterward. Once we step through that door, it locks itself against us.”
For someone like your humble Curmudgeon, sunk deep in years and choices made along the way, it can seem unlikely that any decision I could make now would have a great effect on the years to come, whether mine or others’. (To the advanced grammarians among my Gentle Readers, if any: Is there a rule against ending a sentence with a possessive? If so, please let me know. Thanks.) But there’s chaos theory to keep in mind, isn’t there? So perhaps I should respect the unboundedness of the possibilities.
Among my enduring resolutions is one I adopted long ago: always to speak the truth as I see it. That’s not an unmixed virtue. Truth often hurts. Many an unpleasant truth has come my way these past seven decades. On those occasions when I’ve expressed them publicly, the reaction has nearly always been fury, sometimes bordered on violence.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, he includes a quasi-religion that advocates “living by the foma:” i.e., falsehoods that give comfort rather than the abrasion of unlimited truth. It’s uncertain whether Vonnegut meant that prescriptively. Yet a lot of people do live by such falsehoods. It may be that that’s their cushion against reality’s abrasions, and that they couldn’t bear to live without it.
I can’t go that way. I have to see what is. Having seen it, I have to live with the knowledge. I’ve often felt an obligation to pass such knowledge along, even if it will hurt the recipients.
The awareness of the hurt I’ve caused by doing that has made me think some very dark thoughts. Paramount among them is one I’ve dwelt on to my chagrin.
Very few of us are poised at the levers of history. Very few of us can effectuate even small changes to what is. If in expressing a painful perception or insight to someone else who has no such power, I cause him unhappiness, I’ve darkened his personal reality to no good consequence. Why do such a thing? Why not keep my dark awarenesses to myself and let him rest in his greater comfort?
Try that one on for yourself. Warning: it will pinch.
I have a compulsion to think about what I see, and to express my inferences here and elsewhere. I don’t know why. It probably indicates that I’m not getting enough sex. But whatever the reason, when I start thinking along the lines above, it makes me wonder whether the pain I cause is justified by the improvements I stimulate… if any. It may be that my only possibility of bringing a net benefit to others is by shutting up. It’s not possible to be certain. I can only wonder about it, and I do.
I’d prefer – oh, greatly! – to see positive things, benign developments and possibilities, new and promising vistas. But I haven’t seen many such these past few decades. What I have seen suggests that what Robert A. Heinlein once called “the Renaissance Civilization” – i.e., the United States of America – is in terminal decline, the sociopolitical equivalent of Cheyne-Stokes respiration.
That has colored my writing in two ways. The first affects these opinion pieces, which have grown gloomier with time. The second affects my fiction, which focuses on the decisions and actions of heroes, some of them unsung, sincerely determined to make things better for themselves and others. Which of those is the more “realistic” vision? Must one of them give way to the other?
That’s a particularly gloomy thought.
The Year of Our Lord 2026 is almost upon us. I don’t have any special wisdom about the year about to end, nor any insight into what will come. One of the realizations that comes with advanced age is that there’s little point in trying to foretell the future. For my part, I just hope to live through the coming year and get a few things done that I didn’t manage to finish in 2025.
Wherever you are and whatever your station in life, I wish you, Gentle Readers, a Happy New Year. May 2026 bring you all the best that life has to offer… and may God bless and keep you all.
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