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Robert Burns originally had a different tune in mind for “Auld Lang Syne” than the one most of us know, and although he himself realized the melody was “mediocre,” you will sometimes still hear that original arrangement.* The tune most associated with “Auld Lang Syne” first appeared in 1799 in George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.
By then, Robert Burns was gone. He was only thirty-seven when he died of a heart condition （possibly exacerbated by his habit of raising many a pint glass to old acquaintances）。 In his last letter, he wrote to his friend Frances Dunlop, “An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveler returns.” Even on his deathbed, Burns could turn a phrase.
Within a few decades of Burns’s death, “Auld Lang Syne” had become a popular part of New Year’s Eve celebrations in Scotland, a holiday known as Hogmanay that can trace its history back to winter solstice rituals. By 1818, Beethoven had written an arrangement of the song, and it was beginning to travel throughout the world.
Between 1945 and 1948, the tune was used in South Korea’s national anthem. In the Netherlands, its melody inspired one of the country’s most famous football chants. “Auld Lang Syne” is often played at Japanese department stores just before they close to let customers know it’s time to leave. The song is also a staple of film soundtracks, from Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush in 1925 to It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946 to Minions in 2015.
I think “Auld Lang Syne” is popular in Hollywood not just because it’s in the public domain and therefore cheap, but also because it’s the rare song that is genuinely wistful—it acknowledges human longing without romanticizing it, and it captures how each new year is a product of all the old ones. When I sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, I forget the words like most of us do, until I get to the fourth verse, which I do have memorized: “We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine / but seas between us broad have roared since Auld Lang Syne.”
And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past—seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I’ll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them—and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.
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In 2005, Amy published a memoir in the form of an encyclopedia called Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. That book ends, “I was here, you see. I was.” Another sentence that once it becomes true, never stops being true. Her Encyclopedia came out just a few months before my first novel, Looking for Alaska. Soon thereafter, Sarah got into graduate school at Columbia and so we moved to New York. Amy and I stayed in touch and collaborated occasionally over the next decade—I played a bit part in an experience she curated for hundreds of people on August 8, 2008, in Chicago’s Millennium Park—but it was never again like it had been in those early days.
In her strange and beautiful interactive memoir Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal, published in 2016, she wrote, “If one is generously contracted 80 years, that amounts to 29,220 days on Earth. Playing that out, how many times then, really, do I get to look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let’s just say it is 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot, but it is not infinite, and anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory.” In her writing, Amy often sought to reconcile the infinite nature of consciousness and love and yearning with the finite nature of the universe and all that inhabits it. Toward the end of Textbook, she wrote a multiple-choice question: “In the alley, there is a bright pink flower peeking out through the asphalt. A. It looks like futility. B. It looks like hope.” For me at least, “Auld Lang Syne” captures exactly what it feels like to see a bright pink flower peeking out through the asphalt, and how it feels to know you have 12,395 times to look at a tree.
Amy found out she had cancer not long after finishing Textbook, and she called me. She knew that in the years after my book The Fault in Our Stars was published, I’d come to know many young people who were gravely ill, and she wanted to know if I had advice for her. I told her what I think is true—that love survives death. But she wanted to know how young people react to death. How her kids would. She wanted to know if her kids and her husband would be okay, and that ripped me up. Although I’m usually quite comfortable talking with sick people, with my friend I found myself stumbling over words, overwhelmed by my own sadness and worry.
They won’t be okay, of course, but they will go on, and the love you poured into them will go on. That’s what I should’ve said. But what I actually said, while crying, was, “How can this be happening? You do so much yoga.”
In my experience, dying people often have wonderful stories of the horrible things healthy people say to them, but I’ve never heard of anybody saying something as stupid as, “You do so much yoga.” I hope that Amy at least got some narrative mileage out of it. But I also know I failed her, after she was there for me so many times. I know she forgives me—present tense—but still, I desperately wish I could’ve said something useful. Or perhaps not said anything at all. When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes—often, in fact—you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”
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“Auld Lang Syne” was a popular song during World War I—versions of it were sung in trenches not just by British soldiers, but by French and German and Austrian ones as well, and the song even played a small role in one of the strangest and most beautiful moments in world history, the Christmas Truce of 1914.
On Christmas Eve that year, along part of the war’s Western Front in Belgium, around one hundred thousand British and German troops emerged from their trenches and met one another in the so-called no-man’s-land between front lines. Nineteen-year-old Henry Williamson wrote his mother, “Yesterday the British and Germans met and shook hands in the ground between the trenches and exchanged souvenirs . . . Marvellous, isn’t it?” A German soldier remembered that a British soldier “brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was.” Elsewhere on the front, Captain Sir Edward Hulse recalled a Christmas sing-along that “ended up with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ which we all, English, Scots, Irish, Prussians, Wuttenbergers, etc., joined in. It was absolutely astounding, and if I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked.”
Hulse, who was twenty-five years old at the time, would be killed on the Western Front less than four months later. At least seventeen million people would die as a direct result of the war—more than half the current population of Canada. By Christmas of 1916, soldiers didn’t want truces—the devastating losses of the war, and the growing use of poison gas, had embittered the combatants. But many also had no idea why they were fighting and dying for tiny patches of ground so far from home. In the British trenches, soldiers began to sing the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” with different words: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”