"When we see the Old Year out, we do what many eminent men have done, and what all men desire to do; we die temporarily."

New Years and such things are extraordinarily valuable. They are arbitrary divisions of time; they are a sudden and ceaseless cutting in two of time. But when we have an endless serpent in front of us, what can we do but cut it in two? Time is apparently endless, and it is beyond all question a serpent. The real reason why times and seasons and feasts and anniversaries arose is because this serpent of time would otherwise drag his slow length along over all our impressions, and there would be no opportunity of sharply realising the change from one impression to another. So far from interruptions being in their nature bad for our aesthetic feelings, an interruption is in its nature good. It would be an exceedingly good thing if we had the dread of such an interruption constantly before us when we enjoy anything. It would be good if we expected a bell to ring towards the end of a sunset. It would be good if we thought the clock might strike while we were in the perfect pleasure of staring at sea and sky. Such a sudden check would bring all our impressions into an intense and enjoyable compass, would make the vast sky a single sapphire, the vast sea a single emerald. After long experience of the glories of sensation men find that it is necessary to put to our feelings this perfect artistic limit. And after a little longer experience they find that the God in whom they hardly believe has, as the perfect artist, put the perfect artistic limit- death.

Death is a time limit; but differs in many ways from New Year's Day. The divisions of time which men have adopted are in a sort of way a mild mortality. When we see the Old Year out, we do what many eminent men have done, and what all men desire to do; we die temporarily. Whenever we admit that it is Tuesday we fulfil St. Paul, and die daily. I doubt if the strongest stoic that ever existed on earth could endure the idea of Tuesday following on a Tuesday, and a Tuesday on that, and a Tuesday on that, and all the days being Tuesdays till the Day of Judgment, which might be (by some strange and special mercy) a Wednesday.

-"January One" (Daily News, 1904)

Found in Lunacy and Letters (collection of essays published in 1958