Breaking resolutions

Cake, it turns out, is fundamental to your sense of life as a pleasurable event, as something to be relished - you cannot do without it. As for the journal, attempts to chronicle your daily doings have ended in torpor and disinterest. And that certain impossible person is apparently immune to charity. So give it up, give it all up.

It’s time to break your New Year’s resolution.

I don’t mean to scoff at tradition here. The institution of the New Year’s resolution - unlike, say, Mother’s Day - is actually rather venerable. Old two-faced Janus, god of the turning year (and divine sponsor of the month of January), presented one profile to the past and another to the future, inviting all good Romans to a brief season of sobriety and stock-taking. At this temporal fulcrum, were there apologies that needed to be made? Hatchets that needed burying? Expiations or obligations? Gifts would be exchanged, hands shaken, and so on. I imagine two hard-faced men in togas, grimly and deliberately resolving things.

But this is not our way. Characteristically, we have turned the New Year’s resolution into one of our windy rites of self-improvement - ego-based, goal-oriented, semi-fantastical. And doomed, of course. Shed a pound, write a chapter, briefly increase your earning power, but by mid-February that handsomer and less neurotically obstructed you is well out of reach. Help is needed - self-help. So you go online and purchase the Life and Goal Organizer Deluxe - “a motivating way to organize your New Year’s resolutions.” Or you get over to GotResolutions.com (“Is 2010 going to be the year that you FINALLY do something?”) where for 49 bucks, you can sign up for the 30 Day Got Resolutions Challenge - a wake-up e-mail, a daily video lesson, and a Built In Accountability System to ensure that this year, this time, you don’t blow it like you always do.

There is a seriousness, of course, in our annual call to self-examination, bastardized as it may have become. If you’re trying to shed a nasty habit, you have my most earnest good wishes. If you’re trying to get to the gym now and again, more power to you: Few things in life are not rendered more bearable by a halo of endorphins. But take a tip from an amateur psychologist: Don’t make a resolution out of it. A showdown, a big production. In the endless jujitsu between virtue and vice, I’ve found that the former is better served by deft, spontaneous moves, quick swivels of the spirit, while the latter loves to go head-to-head and grind out a result. Good things are to be accomplished without warning, minus drumroll. That’s my advice. Then again, I haven’t been to the gym for weeks.

“It is certain,” wrote Blaise Pascal in his 122d Pensée, “that as a man’s insight increases so he finds both greatness and wretchedness in himself. In a word man knows he is wretched. Thus he is wretched because he is so, but he is truly great because he knows it.” Pascal was a 17th-century Frenchman who spent much of his time in the higher regions of mathematics, but here, surely, he’s talking plain American sense. The notion of human perfectibility, almost an ideology these days, is one that a moment’s reference to our own experience can refute. We try, we fail, we try again, we fail again - and not just fail but collapse into failure as if into a favorite armchair. Methods, systems, surgeries: all useless. Each fresh lunge at betterment carries within it the germ of its own undoing. Is it innocence that keeps us coming back for more? Not at all, says Pascal, it’s an obtuse pride. Look coolly, rather, at your own wretchedness, without graspingly seeking to alter it, and you might be onto something.

If you really want to quit the cakes, or write an award-winning screenplay, you probably will at some point. People do these things, after all - why shouldn’t you? But let us put aside these noisy resolutions, these petty contractions of the will. Let us rather sit in the cold gatehouse of the year and cheerfully contemplate the futility of such efforts. Whatever it is that you have resolved to do or not do, accept your inevitable defeat. Laugh about it, if you can. And then try it again, if the whim takes you, on an unimportant day, when no one’s looking.

James Parker writes regularly for Ideas and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.