Resolution
Wednesday 1 January 2025
The Remainder
article
RESOLUTION. At 8 o’clock or thereabouts the light begins to stream into the kitchen. This is what life looks like at the year's end: the sun thawing the night off the counter-top, bathing the dirty plates and cutlery in silver and gold. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a year that didn’t end like that. Where I haven’t left everything in to soak overnight. Where my breath didn’t step out in front of me each morning. This is what I remember from my childhood: the light in my voice, in the hazy bowl of the weald, in the steam of the cows and cars across the road.
Every year I forget that the light changes with the clocks. I know that’s why we switch them, we call it ‘daylight savings’ for just that reason. What I mean is that the light changes shape, that it sits lower and lower on the horizon each day. This is how it gets into the kitchen, all over the forks and the little flecks of broccoli. And when it’s gone a candle is lit, earlier and earlier, until it becomes a kind of pilot light. A glowing, golden wax sat among the knives and forks of another meal, waiting their turn to greet the sun.
What can one see by a light so low? One that sits down beside us at the turn of each tide, each tablecloth? A wrinkle flickering by the flame. A fox passing the window. Who turns those tablecloths? Who folds them into the night? You’re a teenager again and you’re cycling through the dark, the bright white light of your torch grating through the mist. There are pots which need washing at the hotel, under halogen bulbs for minimum wage. There’s a woman on the bus in a uniform, her face lit by the cool glow of her phone. There are certainly things to discuss after dark.
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For Oscar Wilde a ‘sentimentalist’ is “one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” He wrote that in 1897, while serving a prison sentence for ‘gross indecency’ (homosexuality), as part of a 50,000-word letter to his lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, publishing it upon his release under the title De Profundis (Latin: ‘from the depths’). For Wilde, a “sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart”, incapable of confronting the complex realities or consequences – the ‘costs’ – that accompany genuine emotional entanglement. From his prison cell such stakes were clearly defined, but elsewhere – in literature as much as life – it can be difficult to articulate what precisely constitutes the ‘emotional excess’ an accusation of ‘sentimentality’ implies.
Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768) typifies what has come to be known as the ‘sentimental novel’ – a genre, popular in the c18th, guided by the emotional narratives and gestures of its characters and audience. In the story, the narrator Reverend Yorick – a thinly-veiled alter ego for Sterne himself – travels through Europe, across France and Italy. During one scene in Paris – following a quarrel with his hotel’s conceited maître d' – Yorick resolves not to purchase laces from a poor ‘grisette’ working for the establishment, however changes his mind after her emotive appeals, commenting:
“If there is not a fund of honest gullibility in man, so much the worse;—my heart relented, and I gave up my second resolution as quietly as the first.—Why should I chastise one for the trespass of another?”
What might Wilde make of this? Perhaps we could say that Yorick’s self-congratulatory reflections – his justification for ‘giving up his resolution’ – reveal a reluctance to grapple with the broader ‘costs’ of his situation, of the girls poverty, and a liberal tendency to sentimentalise (and commercialise) suffering rather than confront it. More generally it reveals a relation between sentimentality and agency, how emotional frameworks shape not just what we feel, but how we act—and whether we act at all—in the face of change. This is, in a way, the linguistic link to Nietzsche’s concept of ‘ressentiment’ – a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority or failing onto an external agent, a scapegoat.
It is also in this way that ‘sentimentality’ becomes bound to temporality, often through a reactionary nostalgia for the past. As F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in his debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920):
“No, I’m romantic—a sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t. Sentiment is emotional…”
What makes a future possible? A future where things might be radically different to how they are now? The etymological root of resolution lies in the Latin resolutio, which means both ‘to loosen’ and ‘to solve’ – to ‘unwind’ or ‘settle’ a problem. In the Latin epic the Aeneid – written by Virgil in C1st BCE – one reads of Daedalus’ exploits in unravelling the mysteries of the Cretan labyrinth for the hero Theseus:
“...magnum reginae sed enim miseratus amorem Daedalus ipse dolos tecti ambagesque resolvit, caeca regens filo vestigia.” [“...yet Daedalus himself, pitying the noble princess Ariadne’s love, unravelled the deceptive tangle of corridors, guiding Theseus’s blind footsteps with the clue of thread.”]
Yes, perhaps the sentimentalist and the romantic are a naive Apollo and Dionysus – the excesses in each of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ – two means of ‘unwinding’ the journey ahead?
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In some strange way I feel fortunate to have lived in a world before high-definition television (HDTV). I can remember the warm fuzz of the cathode-ray tube, the blurry edges of Marge Simpson’s electric blue hair, the way the box would hum a picture into my dreams… I also feel fortunate to remember the excitement of the change to HDTV. I can picture the shiny labels, and the walls of flatscreens beaming daytime shows into consumer-electronics warehouses. I remember heated debates over the eye-watering prices and a fear that ‘the switch’ might go awry.
The first HD program broadcast in the UK was Planet Earth, which premiered on BBC HD on May 27th, 2006. This inaugural episode dealt with the ‘Great Plains’ – the African savannah, Asian steppe, Arctic tundra and North American prairie – exploring the wildlife that survives in these supposedly ‘empty’ landscapes. However, as David Attenborough is quick to point out, any impression of emptiness is an illusion – that, “at the heart of all that happens here is a single living thing. Grass.” What follows is then a slew of crystalline footage – reminiscent, in some way, of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten – with the camera zooming from the macro to the micro, from a vast undulating landscape to the ears of wheat which sustain it.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20; and this moment, or perhaps this movement – as the camera pans across the ‘distant reaches of outer mongolia’ – is, in some way, the pinnacle of a world-view which collapsed along with the financial crash. If resolution is about seeing things clearly, either as the ‘effect of an optical instrument’ (c.1860) or through a ‘steadfastness of purpose’ (c.1580), what was it precisely that we were getting ‘HD READY’ to see?
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This was the year I read autofiction: Annie Ernaux’s The Years & A Woman’s Story; W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants; M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here; Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts & Bluets; Habib W. Kherbek’s Fail Worse. Perhaps, to quote Kherbek, this was even the year I wrote autofiction.
McKenzie Wark, writing in 2023 on the recent surge in autofiction and ‘autotheory’, comments:
“Selfhood itself is a fiction, and the writing is an account of how the fiction of a self is produced.”1
Autofiction is, in this sense, a kind of resolution; a way of both seeing and making oneself. Of (dis)entangling the problem of the self, of one’s future, of the future as a whole.
In the past ‘New Years resolutions’ (first attested in the 1780s) were pious affairs, a means of reaffirming one's relation to the church and its teachings. However, it seems even these were designed to be broken… on January 1st 1813 an issue of a Boston newspaper ran a short article titled “The Friday Lecture” in which was written:
“And yet, I believe there are multitudes of people, accustomed to receive injunctions of new year resolutions, who will sin all the month of December, with a serious determination of beginning the new year with new resolutions and new behaviour, and with the full belief that they shall thus expiate and wipe away all their former faults.”
Perhaps such a view is sentimental? An idea of one’s future in which nothing will change, nothing will go wrong? In which one can possibly live up to the ideals one has set for oneself? The resolutions of a new year are autofictions, yes, and as anyone who has read autofiction knows, the self is an idea which is always unravelling. If the word resolution implies that ‘to loosen’ is ‘to solve’, perhaps this should be our resolution as well? To unwind in one way or another? Or perhaps I am simply a romantic.
This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout