'It Is Most Us'

'It Is Most Us'
On being human at the fin de millénaire.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, December 28, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST

It's not just the sudden calm following the conniptions of electing the new president. Nor is it solely the aftereffects of holiday meals. Nor is it the cold snap bedeviling much of the country. It's not even the jitters in the markets.

No, there is something deeper that accounts for that odd sense of limbo as we peer into the new millennium. It has a lot to do, I think, with the implausible dreams and utopian hopes of mankind. These are hard to square with millennia of reality: with the practical plane on which people from Massachusetts to the Middle East go on quarreling and killing, on which the leadership of the free world can bog down in arguments over chads and Katherine Harris's makeup; on which families gathered for the holidays can find themselves wondering why life gets so complicated.

The collision between the real and ideal can get pretty disconcerting, especially when the holiday schedule hits us in midpracticality with the message that it's time to care about things complete and eternal. Suspended between Christmas and New Year's, this has got to be--at almost every level--the most unrealistic week in the calendar. Daily routine falls away. The pope calls for world peace. Families, whatever their private rifts, are broadly expected to re-enact the final glowing moments of a Jimmy Stewart movie. The sad and lonely get loud prompts that whatever the reality, they are now supposed to achieve epiphanies of love and joy. Even New Year's Eve, with the genuine advent of the millennium now looming, stands waiting yet again for ceremony inspired enough to usher in not just the next year but the next 1,000 years.

Who are we kidding? And why--from the pope to the party planners--are we setting ourselves up for such a roster of flops? All recorded history reminds us that universal peace is unlikely. At a more personal level, holidays for many folks are a time of strain, compromise and sometimes agonizing reminders of loss. New Year's resolutions tend to dwindle fast into thumbnail guides to self-reproach. And one of the dirty little secrets of New Year's Eve is that, what with all that exhausting pressure to celebrate, it can get tough simply staying awake till midnight. Anyone who has been through any normal run of life's ups and downs has to know that when the holidays are good, they're really good--but when they are bad, all those lofty expectations can make them truly horrid.

And yet. What makes this week vital is precisely this jumble of difficult or impossible ideals. Whether we live up to them or not.

Ideal visions are important, in part, because sometimes what seemed impossible can with enough persistence at least come closer. Twenty years ago we were living with the Cold War, a still-expanding Soviet empire and the precarious sense of a heavily armed and highly focused enemy occupying a big chunk of the planet. This Christmas brought the ninth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union--and a resulting degree of relief in world politics that has let an entire generation come of age preoccupied with dot-coms instead of the bomb.

On a more intimate level, there are those times when families--or even people who are alone--find plenty to celebrate, when the rituals of food and festivity are matched in full by genuine good cheer. A cousin of mine once noted that a day or two of family life that lives up to the billing can get you through a lot of long gritty bouts of quiet despair.

But even when the ideals remain absolutely beyond reach, they are worth revisiting. It's a chance to step back and notice afresh that a basic part of being human is the need to strive for something big, something good--something maybe forever impossible, but not beyond all imagining, and therefore, still important.

To be human is to live in almost constant rebellion against the world as it is. Most of us want to be remembered for something, even though it's a good bet we won't be remembered long. We long for happiness, when we are all slated in the end for a portion of heartbreak. And even though in the long run we're all dead, most of us will fight for every extra year or even day of life. As ritual markers through the years, the holidays bring us slam-up against these contraries. Life is both so ordinary and at the same time so full of desire for the extraordinary, so shot through with both the mundane and the poetic. It's a pretty strange mix.

In another few days, with a jolt and a rush, we will be getting on with the business of the year 2001. But right now, for anyone seeking bearings as we move through a stretch encompassing the winter solstice, religious renewal and the millennium--along with big questions about, say, world peace, interest rates and individual happiness--I'd recommend a few lines by Robert Frost. In his poem "West-Running Brook," Frost describes the water of a swift brook running up against a rock in midstream, to make a white wave thrown back against the current:

It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.

It is from this in nature we are from. It's a lot of work, being human, not least during the holidays. But the glory of it is, as Frost concludes, "it is most us."

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."