Auld lang syne

I have never been a particular fan of Robert Burns; but never say never. I think one of the lessons any enthusiastic reader soon picks up on is that there is a time and season for just about everything and just because you haven't taken to a particular work or author doesn't mean you never will.

The one piece of Burnsiana that has stuck with me is his poem Auld Lang Syne, sung at the changing of the year and other occasions of passing. Of course my fondness for it is in part that rich bank of associations which it evokes; friends and family and parties of years past. There was also, and frankly still is, a fascination with the almost otherworldliness of the language. Phrases you feel you ought to know and understand but don't quite.

I came across this passage in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods which captures a little bit of that other-wordliness frontier of the poem, the boundary between the here-and-now and the tapestry of the past. A little bit of that feeling as a small child when you stayed up with your parents as they visited with friends, drifting softly into that half-world of eyes closed but ears open, ebbing into sleep with the sound of laughter occassionally intruding.

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"

"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, "This is now."

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.