Series: The 12 Week Countdown

Series: The 12 Week Countdown

Every week for 12 weeks until the dawn of the Year 2012, I am blogging about things to look forward to and things to dread about the coming year. Today there are...

...2 Weeks To 2012: Secret Anniversaries

This has been a funny old week for me. If I wasn't enough of a "thinker" already, then this week has surely done it.

I haven't read the book itself (yet), but I'm familiar with one very famous quote from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles:

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby's birth and death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor's thought that some time in the future those who had known her would say: 'It is the ----th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died'; and there would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the place in month, week, season or year.

It's not my intention to scare people (well, not on this occasion, anyway), but it's such a poignant quote, and one which, as well leaving you with a sense of total fear, can also leave you with optimism - depending on which way you choose to look at it.

We pass anniversaries every single year. Some of them have already been revealed to us - for all of us, our birthdays; for some of us our wedding anniversaries, and for others the anniversary of the day we first became a Gooner - and others remain, for a little while longer, a secret.

Our deaths will remain a secret until the day itself comes, but for those of us who aren't married, haven't had children and haven't yet achieved our ultimate goal in life, whatever that may be, those anniversaries are still waiting in the wings. We pass those dates every single year; we will pass them in 2012 and will know nothing of it, but that makes it no less significant.