The Yeti at the Very End

A New Year's essay about the hairy people we meet at the end of time and the end of all our schemes and systems

In that last countdown - “three, two, one” - there’s a slight pause when it is no particular year, before the “happy new year.” It’s short. But there’s a hesitation, a tremble even.

This time of year is more commonly referred to as the end than the beginning of the year. And there’s something eerie and powerful about it. We hurry and hurry, and then suddenly everything stops.

The crack

Every garment has a seam. Every cycle has a beginning and an end. There’s a crack in everything, as the song goes. That goes for time, too.

The end of the year is one such crack. In the Gregorian calendar, it comes ten days after winter solstice and six days after Christmas. Different cultures say the year ends in different seasons. It’s arbitrary, as any New-Year’s-Eve party pooper will remind you.

New Year’s is s a milestone in a desert, a buoy in the ocean. It could just as easily be anywhere else. It is significant because it is arbitrary. It’s where we throw up our hands and call it year, call it 2023, 2024, throw another log on the fire and start again. It’s where one attempt at counting reaches its limits.

But that final countdown with all its noise fails to contain time. It doesn’t even give us a satisfying feeling for it. The new year will begin on Monday this year, but it could just as easily be a Wednesday or a Saturday, and little would be different. But at that crack, that final countdown, we do hold our breath a little.

Other cracks

There are other places that our count of time shows its cracks. The leap year is one, where we have to sneak in an extra day to keep the years in line with the seasons. Another is every 128 years, when we have to skip the leap year for the same reason. This 128-year count is tough, because it’s longer than a human life, and longer than most forms of human organization. How people came to understand this 128-year cycle, and how they came to transmit knowledge of it is a jumping-off point for Arthur Corwin’s book Robin Hood’s Barn.