The Quest Renewed

Once a year, in the season when spirits and the sun are at their lowest, nature presents us with a clean slate. So what if the previous 12 months were studded with sins, nonfeasance and miscalculations. On January 1, we get to start all over again, and this time to do it right.

Of course we hope for a better world. But it's the little thinkgs we wish for ourselves - and resolve to work for - that give New Year's Day its special cachet. We wish for a few less pounds, or in the unlikely event that we need them, a few more. We decide that we must get more exercise, and that, yes, this is the year in which we will, once and for all, give up smoking. We tell ourselves that come Spring, we'll repair the roof and plant the garden and, by heaven, we're going to go through all that stuff lying around and give away what we don't need.

Why do we make these promises to ourselves? We do it because a long time ago we read that man was a little lower than the angels, and we believed it. The possibility of perfection is the most enduring of all illusions, and its pursuit is the most enduring of all quests.

Perfection, of course, is not within: unflawed is unhuman. But perhaps we are perfectible. We can come close, we tell ourselves. Maybe next time. Maybe next year. Maybe this year.

The New York Times