Time As An Aesthetic Object

And a measly defence of rituals

If they so decide, a man and a woman may start a new family without embarking on a ceremony. Folks elope all the time; man and woman, to start a new home, forgoing all the ceremonies that we call a wedding: vows, public declaration, and feasting. And as so many of you ask these days, why do we need the church or the government to assent to matrimony? Honestly, very little. It looks like an unnecessity. Something that can be done away with without losing anything significant. Yet, in many instances, we do it all the same. We insist on it. What then is the point of it all?

Just as we ask why weddings cannot proceed without a ceremony, some of you have already asked if the new year or the accompanying rapturous celebration holds any real weight in and of itself. This is a welcome probe. Without criticisms like this, we will lose ourselves in our rituals to the point of self-indulgence which has more dangerous consequences; we will perform rituals for rituals’ sake which endangers men by turning what was made for man into man was made for. Criticisms allow us to renew our attention and wake us up from dogmatic slumbers.

People celebrate the new year with bright colours around a huge clock tower

Now while it is true that the new year is, if we stare hard at time itself, just another passing day, holding no weight and quality of itself, it does not mean that it fails to point to something which might be ignored altogether. It is an object that if you contemplate it, allows something else to shine through, causing our attention to fall on what are the most important things.

Understand that it is in our nature to always fall into mental slumber. We cannot live any other way; total wakefulness endangers us. We must go through life at various points in a state of sleep, deferring to repetitive motions which saves us a good amount of energy that we might spend on those affairs which ask for wakefulness. Yet, we cannot slumber for life. We may not be totally wakeful but we cannot be totally asleep too. For a man in slumber, if he is a somnambulist, may walk into a fire or a railway while the train is coming. Therefore, total slumber carries its danger. So from time to time, we must wake up and pay attention to the things which deserve them. Nonetheless, it is hard to stare at those things directly. We do not have that perspective. Like, how do we attend to existence directly? Or eternity? There are things—like the sun—which we cannot fix our gaze on consistently and not be wounded. You cannot turn your eyes up all day examining the sun and have a productive day. So, we gaze at these good things through other objects, from an indirect point of view. Or some would say “oblique.”

And this is why rituals like a wedding ceremony and New Year celebrations exist. They call our attention to the things that matter without having to stare at them directly. Like a wedding ceremony, involving vows and stern warnings, tells everyone present that matrimony is a serious subject that should not be treated recklessly. I reckon that it should be easy for those who elope to treat their family like it is another thing to escape from. But those who have made vows before God and man know that they have shut the door behind them. Ideally. We take it for granted that marriage is serious business. Therefore the ceremony involving all expense, toil, and fatigue serves as a reminder for couples and witnesses alike that something arduous lies ahead. The warnings, the sermons, and the counsel from older couples signal that this is serious business. This is a lesson that we lose to the repetition of day-to-day activities just until the couple reflects on their big day and it reminds them that this is serious business. This way, a ceremony is a landmark that helps us to retrace our steps when we are caught in a sandstorm.

This is precisely why rituals are important. They enhance the way we perceive things that we quickly ignore because due to the force of sheer habit, we have fallen into a slumber. And the rituals surround us: matriculation ceremonies, convocations, oath-takings, ordinations, and weddings. These events all serve to exaggerate, for our benefit, how we perceive the things which lie beyond the event/ceremony. But we must not mistake these exaggerations for an inflation of their importance. The importance stays unchanging; we are just very good at ignoring, forgetting, and neglecting them. What these exaggerations do is force us to look in the right direction with the right amount of focus so that we might grasp the importance therein—that is, what the ceremony signifies. A doctor may go day to day serving his patients. But if due to monotony he starts to lose his ethical beacon in his line of work, he may look back and reimagine himself reciting the Hippocratic oath with that youthful vigour and passion. He may use this to reinvigorate his ethics twenty-five years later as he attends to a dying woman.

In the same way, celebrating the new year — which is just really a new day — forces us to pay attention to our existence. That we might number our days. It yanks us aggressively yet gleefully out of our slumber that we might reflect on our steps and crosscheck the paths that we have walked sleepily in the course of the past 365 days. Acknowledging time is how we contemplate existence and eternity.

But one more thing to celebrate, if anything at all, is the genius that goes into studying time and space. Men with great minds laboured hard in carving up time in a way that is fruitful for tracking our existence. Thus, we can attend to matters of eternity by contemplating time. Time then becomes an object which when not spent on our passing desires, invites our rational interest and allows us to have a sense of our chief ends. 

So, even if you are not captivated by the euphoria, fireworks, prayers, and resolutions that decorate the turn of the year, you can look to the intellectual labours of ancient astronomers who penetrated the fabrics of space-time to give us order, and from order meaning. Should you choose to go one step further to celebrate this ingenuity, you can also give thanks to God for this exceptional ability.

One more thing to be grateful for. The importance we have placed on the new year gives us a rare moment where we see other human beings in a good light. Not in the light of seeing them as instruments we use to satisfy our consumerist appetites. But with a grateful light that whispers “Thank God you are here.” We think of spending these delicate moments together while not caring much if the world is falling. We are all just happy to be here…together. Where all earnestness is held at arm’s length and we have something similar to rest; to a Sabbath. If for anything at all, be grateful for this one.

So then, in the sense of the new year disrupting our slumber, attracting attention to human ingenuity, and bringing a moment of respite, we can say that time functions as an aesthetic object. We can rejoice in it. Take it in. Contemplate it. Relish it.

Happy New Year.