Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2001-12-30- 6:07 p.m.

Bye Bye 2001

2001 is a hard year to categorize, both for me personally and for the world in general. I don’t really like to do this anyways; I loathe the need to constantly make signposts along both the road of my life and the implacable march of time itself. Time seems like a tangible thing, but it isn’t. Sometimes, I can mark off the events of each day or week; at others, it seems whole years begin to blend into each other.
But listing the good and the bad that has occurred in 2001 seems wrong to me. First and foremost, the tragedy of 9-11 looms to large over everything. If I include it in the list, how fucking trivial does it seem to also put on the page what moved me in movies or in music, or my own financial and employment battles, or the joy of seeing my first friends getting married?
The truth is, individual life is both very small and very cheap. Even in the community of those who put up their lives in online journals for all to see, I am but one among many, a needle in a haystack. If I were to shut down tomorrow, would I be missed? Well, hopefully, those of you who read me would miss me. But not too badly; I am new to you, and to the community, and I’m not pamie or Jon-Jon. But the community as a whole would barely notice, and you would forget soon too, and regardless, ten new journals would leap in to fill the space I so recently vacated.
It is the same with life, only more so. Thousands and thousands are born and die each day. And as a whole, that doesn’t change the world much. I make a habit of reading the AP wire, and there’s something interesting that I have noticed: only about once a week does an obituary of any single person appear there. Only about 52 people of enough renown to deserve special mention by the Associated Press die each year. The rest of us serve as a sort of grist for the mill of life. We live out our lives, we have children, and we pass on. For those of us in New York City, even if we are murdered, our deaths will barely be noticed beyond our friends and family; we will be buried somewhere in the middle of the Metro section of the Times.
And I suppose that is the way it should be.
I have a confession to make: I’ve never cared for the Diary of Anne Frank. To my mind, she always made it all seem so small, as if the calculated murder of six million Jews and six million other ‘undesirables’ could be reduced to the loss of one precocious little girl multiplied. It reduces it to me, makes it into something it isn’t: something that we all can comprehend. How can we begin to think about the loss of twelve million lives, or for that matter, three thousand? I keep seeing Dateline specials, telling the stories of Christmases without loved ones lost that horrible September morning. It makes my heart bleed for those families, who will never see their fathers or mothers or sons or daughters again. It gives me a window into their pain.
But it does something else, something that I don’t want it to: it allows me to make sense of what happened. When I was younger, I watched Claude Lanzman’s Shoah, and I was able to understand how a bunch of banal bureaucrats methodically went about murdering my great-aunts and uncles. And in the immortal words of Ned Flanders, there are things that I don’t want to know. Important things.
To me, all the little things that happen to me and that I write about in here are huge. They are the Everests and the Kilimanjaros of my world. And they are worth sharing, because we are all built that way. Each of us is a universe unto ourselves, awesome and all-encompassing. And you read me. Perhaps because I sometimes amuse you, or because I give a new perspective on things, or maybe and hopefully because I can sometimes find a deeper truth in my life that resonates in yours. I believe that words and ideas and stories have a power that goes beyond the page. I don’t fool myself that I am the master of their power, and that I can use my words to truly convey to you what I mean. But in the short time that I have been doing this, I hope that I have harnessed them some, and shown you perhaps a glimpse of what I have tried.
But I feel small now, very small, when thinking about 2001 and what it has meant to me. I don’t want to catalogue the year in terms of my own highs and lows. My year belonged only to me; 2001 belonged to things that dented the history books. Instead, let me do something traditionally done about a month ago.
In the year 2001, I am thankful for my life. I am thankful to have the love and understanding of my family and my friends. I am thankful for the opportunities given to me. I am thankful that I was born of sound mind and body, and have remained so. I am thankful for what wisdom I have. This life has seen fit to show me great and terrible things, and to allow me to endure. I am thankful that in such a terrible year, I have known my own small yet sublime joys.
I am thankful that I will see 2002, and that all that is awful and wonderful and so much larger than me will continue in it. And I am thankful that the minute and rich part that is my life will continue in it as well.
To each and every one of you, and to myself as well, all of my hopes for the best in the new year.
L'Shanah Tovah!

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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