betweennesses

We are in a time of betweennesses. As the year turns and many things in the world are in transition, we are in a condition between the dark and the daylight, between a rock and a hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea, between you and me and the wallpaper. The old year now away is fled, the new year now is enterèd. Shortly we will be at Twelfth-Night, when traditionally for a liminal evening the social order was revocably overturned, a kind of Las Vegas of the ecclesiastical season. Shortly after that, this time around, political changes will occur that, history has indicated, will not be so readily revocable.

But for the past fortnight, more or (likely) less, we have been on holiday, we have been in YOLO-days, we have been pivoting at the sun’s minimum (or maximum, if you are in the antipodes), we have been on a break from our usual rules of consumption. We are seeing double – and not just because of the doubles we may have been drinking.

And so there are the betweennesses: two e’s for taking time to ease ourselves, two n’s for the two ends of the years, two s’s for… hmm, what? In the southern hemisphere, for spring and summer, but up north it’s winter and fall, and winter to fall is WTF – the same as the first three weekdays of 2025. Let’s say the s’s are for stop and start – how is that? So-so? Let’s assess.

It is, truly, a time of be-twin-ness: two alike and yet different, a year and another year, good twin and evil twin, and never the twin shall meet except at the passing shadow of midnight.

“Never the twain shall meet,” you insist? Yes, well, twain and twin are, in origin, the same word, as is the tween in between, and they have the same root as two too. The be- is not an imperative (“be tween!”) but just an old form of by; between meant – and means – ‘by two’, as in by one on the one side and by the other on the other. And -ness is an old suffix that has always served to make a noun of quality, and -es is just the plural for the extra s (excess? ha, success).

But betweennesses makes a fine lengthy word that can be divided so many ways: a bet to start (the odds are always betweennesses); a twee that is a little too cute; een, which is an odd kind of even or, if hallowed, evening; the nnesses, which is Guinnesses after the first good quaff; the nesses, which is one less than onenesses; ness, the name of a loch in the Great Glen, the deep valley that cuts aslant the Scottish Highlands, the meeting point of two tectonic plates, a place with its fault (a strike-slip fault) but not without its creature comforts; esses, which self-describes with ease; sses, which is what’s left if you assess asses and they lose their head.

But what goes around comes around, not just years but decades and centuries, even though the turning happens almost imperceptibly, like the smallest sound. A century ago this year, T.S. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men,” a poem about betweennesses, and this is how it all comes around in the end:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

            For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

            Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

            For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

But in every instant a world ends and another is born. We know only the world that has passed and can act only towards the world that is yet to come, so our lives are an infinite series of betweennesses. So happy new world, and again, and again.