Another Year

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 444, 26 December 1947, Page 5

Another Year

HE exciting feature of every new year is its almost complete uncertainty. . Seasons come and go, but we have no idea when they come in what circumstances they will go for any one of us. We think we know what the present signs mean; or some of them; and now and again we do. But more often than not we misinterpret them as completely as the weather is misjudged by meteorologists whose instruments are faulty and records incomplete. It seems to most of us at the present time, for example, that 1948 will be a disturbing and trying year. It begins with war, or near war, in China, India, Palestine, and France; with a profound economic crisis in Britain to which no one can yet see the end; with a struggle between liberty and control in all those parts of the world popularly regarded as civilised (including our own); in short with half the people in the world whose destinies most nearly affect. our own living anxiously on the, edge of a volcano. Those are the signs that it would be criminal folly to refuse to see. But it is only a degree less lunatic to decide on such evidence that the battle is lost already. It is easy to play the fool with history, but easier and commoner to play it with no-history; with the knowledge of the moment and the short stretch of path we can see at our feet. We may not always be able to feel, with Browning, that in the long run all is well with the world, but we can agree with him that the commonest causes of depression and fear are darkness and incomplete vision; seeing the part and not the whole. The thin shreds of history that are all most of us possess loudly proclaim the folly of easy surrenders. They proclaim too, no doubt, the folly of rhetorical swagger, of filling our bellies with the east wind and calling it confidence. But even the worst kind of optimism is safer to live with, and easier to endure, than the nerveless pessimist who is sure that every cloud on the horizon is smoke from the bottomless pit.