Should Old Acquaintance be Forgot: It's a Question

Should old acquaintance be forgot,and never brought to mind?Should old acquaintance be forgot,and old lang syne?CHORUS:For auld lang syne, my dear,for auld lang syne,we'll take a cup of kindness yet,for auld lang syne.And surely you'll buy your pint cup and surely I'll buy mine!And we'll take a cup o' kindness yet,for auld lang syne.CHORUSWe two have run about the slopes,and picked the daisies fine ;But we've wandered many a weary foot,since auld lang syne.CHORUSWe two have paddled in the stream,from morning sun till dine† ;But seas between us broad have roaredsince auld lang syne.

Like most everyone else, I’ve heard Auld Lang Syne at least once practically every year of my life. I never read the lyrics until this year though, so it’s the first time I realized that the two opening lines are phrased as questions, rather than conditions. In other words, it is not a case of if old acquaintances are forgotten; it is a case of do I, through my own volition, forget old acquaintances. Do I choose to purge from my heart and my mind those who once occupied a prominent place there?It makes for a much harsher take on relationships, which under the conditional interpretation of the lyrics merely implies the obvious—that relationships often fall victim to the vagaries of individual lives. We move, change jobs, remarry, win or lose, etc…and any or all of those can have a negative impact on our relationships, even those of longest duration or deepest feelings. But to willfully purge a relationship…or even ask if one should be purged...takes it to a whole other level. It turns the relationship question into the classic stock market question—should I buy or should I sell?Oddly enough, this mercantile view of relationships comes down to us from Robert Burns, one of the most romantic figures of the 18thcentury, and it greatly informs Facebook, the social arbiter of the 21stcentury. On Facebook one chooses willfully to “friend” or (more to the point) ”unfriend”…to buy or to sell a relationship. It is a calculation: is this someone I want in my life--even at a distance--or is this someone I want out of my life?Part of me wants to believe that the question mark in Burns’s lyric is one of those errant punctuation marks that gets recklessly added to a piece of work as it passes down through the ages and was not Burns's doing. I like to think that Burns was too much the poet to put so much emphasis on the deliberateness of relationships. He was, after all, a major influence on three contemporaries I greatly admire—John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and Bob Dylan. Still, if you read through the rest of the lyric after the two opening questions, you see an undeniable strain of bittersweet there of a relationship gone bad. Is not George's killing of Lenny in Of Mice and Men the ultimate unfriending?  Is not Holden Caulfield's contempt for all whom he meets an act of determined forgetting? And Dylan very well could’ve read Auld Lang Syne before he sat down to write Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (“But goodbye’s too good a word, gal/So I’ll just say fare thee well”).
It’s all an illusion of course. We don’t march in and out of relationships at will, as much as we sometimes may try. We may friend some and unfriend others, but in the end our feelings for others rule the day...and our memories. That’s why I link here to Dan Fogelberg’s Same Auld Lang Syne, the tale of two people who obviously chose at one point to unfriend each other (well, one of them did anyway), only to find out many years later how strong feelings linger.Happy New Year to all readers of The Nob and deepest thanks for your support in 2013.