Happy New Year

Though it's not quite time for it, we can hear in our inner ear the savage and beautiful noise the town makes at midnight of December 31st. This roar is inaudible if you're in a noisy room yourself. To hear it you have to get to a window, or out on a roof, or in the streets somewhere not too near the core in Times Square. In all life there is no sound like it -- the orectic cry of millions of partially lost souls, grown a year older hating death. A great common sound, full of all the wild wants that lie between a drunken kiss and a child's prayer.

E. B. White, The New Yorker, Dec. 29, 1934