HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Well hello there, New Year's Reveler. I hope you're getting some hot coffee and a big plate of bacon and eggs to ease the pain of last year's parting gift-- a hangover.

Once you've got your coffee and your fork, go ahead and start 2014 off right: by looking at old polariods of strangers that I found on pinterest, accompanied by the witty words of great authors and poets.




"New Years Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual." - Mark Twain

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 "For last year's words belong to last year's language / And next year's words await another voice."

"What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning."

-both from the poem "Little Gidding"by T.S. Eliot (sections II and IV, respectively)

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"I tasted -- careless -- then
I did not know the Wine
Came once a world -- did you?"

-from the poem "One Year Ago -- jots what?" by Emily Dickinson 

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"Only a night from old to new;

Only a sleep from night to morn.

The new is but the old come true;

Each sunrise sees a new year born." 

-from the poem "New Year's Morning" by Helen Hunt Jackson 

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"Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man." -Benjamin Franklin 

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Feliz año, este año, para ti, para todos
los hombres, y las tierras, Araucanía amada.
Entre tú y mi existencia hay esta noche nueva
que nos separa, y bosques y ríos y caminos.
Pero hacia ti, pequeña patria mía,
como un caballo oscuro mi corazón galopa:
entro por sus desiertos de pura geografía,
paso los valles verdes donde la uva acumula
sus verdes alcoholes, el mar de sus racimos.

Happy year to you, this year, to all
mankind and lands, beloved Araucania.
Between you and my existence a new night
separates us, an forests and rivers and roads.
But my heart gallops towards you
like a dark horse, my little land:
I enter deserts of pure geography,
pass green valleys where the grape accumulates
its green alcohols, the sea of its clusters. 

-from the poem "Feliz año a mi patria en tinieblas" ("Happy Year to my Country in Darkness") by Pablo Neruda; translation by Jack Schmitt 

 

"Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we will shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever." -Mark Twain