A New Year’s Moment

The start of a new year prompts Stefany Anne Golberg to meditate on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting “Woman before the Rising Sun,” which she says she would like to retitle “New Year’s Moment”:

A woman in a long dark dress stands facing a sunrise that bursts up from behind a mountain. The rays of sun blaze and illuminate the rocky landscape, turning the sky a fiery orange. The woman is quite far from the sunrise but Friedrich positioned her in such a way that the rays seem to be shooting out of her whole body. And even so, she is not contorted in ecstasy before the new day. She’s not grasping at the sunrise either, trying to gather the sun into herself. She simply stands there, waiting, her arms turned slightly open.

Interestingly, this painting is sometimes called “Woman before the Setting Sun.” Caspar David Friedrich … often mixed up time in his paintings. Now something is rising, now something is passing, now something is dying, now something reborn — nature and time always infinite, and mysterious, happenings to stand before in mute awe. Friedrich once said of his paintings (in other words, his life), “I shall leave it to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot.” This is exactly what the woman in “Woman before the Rising Sun (Woman before the Setting Sun)” is doing. She opens her hands a little bit toward to the coming sun and invites the new day to arrive. She welcomes her spring as the winter passes, leaving time to show what will come of it.

For Adam Gopnik the new year brings to mind the stories of the Titanic and its more successful twin ship, the Olympic:

You have certainly heard of the Titanic; you have probably never heard of the Olympic. We have a fatal attraction to fatality. We don’t have one movie called “Titanic,” starring Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, about a tragic love and a doomed adventure, and another called “Olympic,” a musical comedy starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, about a happy voyage over. We have only one movie, and remember only one sad tale. …

Two boats set sail in those prewar years a century ago: the boat that sailed on and the boat that sank. Olympic or Titanic? Which is ours? It is, perhaps, essential to life to think that we know where we’re going when we set out—our politics and plans alike depend on the illusion that someone knows where we’re going. The cold-water truth that the past provides, though, may be that we can’t. To be a passenger in history is to be unsure until we get to port—or the lifeboats—and, looking back at the prow of our ship, discover the name, invisible to our deck-bound eyes, that it possessed all along.

(Image of Woman before the Rising Sun (Woman before the Setting Sun) by Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1820, via Wikimedia Commons)