A very nice house for her. She didn't care... And the like. For most people, the emotion on the occasion of 2020 could be summed up in one of these "traditional" formulations.
That infantile urge is almost seeping through, that beautiful pagan illusion that it is possible - you just need to see this year off as soon as possible. And everything will get better. It's like the years are drawers, so you can close them at your own discretion. Time does not know what a calendar is.
Just as today we know nothing more about the nature of time itself than St. Augustine - who said that he knows what time is when no one asks him, but when someone asks him, he doesn't know.
The final days of the year that taught us extraordinary things and showed us how soon after work one gets used to it are coming to an end. It is one of the frightening lessons of the year that is about to expire.
The year we went through masked and distanced. And more or less obedient. A year that hit the foundations of our world in an unusual way. With unexpected symbolic and other consequences. Sports events without an audience call into question the very concept of personal witnessing in the ecstasy of visual civilization. Any form of reality exists only as media-mediated.
Year of death. There used to be "death fields", and here we had - days, weeks and months of death. No rest.
Death appeared as a pile of numbers, from end to end of the world: of the dead and the infected. And you never know when your number might be drawn. Corona-lottery in Babylonia.
A year so unusual that nothing was surprising, it also brought the (un)expected end of an era. The fall of DPS and the departure of Amfilohi undoubtedly mark the end of a three-decade era in modern Montenegro. (I guess the Party and the Church will never again have the kind of power that belonged to both of them in Montenegro in the past decades.) And what comes next? What does the coming epoch bring us? It would not be good for the clericalization of society to be the key process that will mark the odd years. And it is not that there is no hint (and strength) to turn in that direction.
Does this society deserve a step forward? Or there is no way out of history, and our unquenchable epidemic of lies and hatred. A vaccine has not yet been invented for this infection. Or at least it didn't arrive in Montenegro.
Will the next epoch bring the Europeanization of Montenegro? Is that just a dream too? How far are we from the moment when Montenegro will become a full member of the EU? Perhaps that moment now seems somewhat closer, or at least less like a phantasm for daily political use.
This year proved that Death is one hell of a selector. And she always was. In anything. Look, for example, at the football team selected by Death in 2020, that year of no mention.
From Ray Clemens in goal, to the eleven that Robbie Rensenbrink would definitely take charge of. Even in the atmosphere of death, Maradona must be a key fantasist, a top ten in the other world as well. Football's Hermes, a walker between worlds. The fast-footed Paolo Rossi and the "Soviet bomber" Viktor Ponedeljnik at the peak of the attack. The defense is led by the man who tamed Eusebio, Manchester United legend Norbert Nobby Styles. There are also Slaven Zambata, Buba Diop, Krasnodar Rora, Vladica Popović... On the bench - Oto Barić or Radomir Antić.
Death, at will. It would be a team for great works. It is the same with the selector whose call is impossible to refuse.
These are all topics to think about in the days that will bring us an extraordinary version of the ancient pagan holiday. What do we want from the new year or, more pretentiously, from the new Montenegrin era? Do we have a right to hope? Or at least neither the pandemic nor politics can take that away from us, no matter how devastating they are.
Bonus video:
