While you are reading this, I am meeting my last classes of the semester at George Mason University. I have borrowed Frank Kermode’s phrase for the header of this column because, at the conclusion of every semester, the class writes about endings.

Everyone tries to make sense of endings. Did we end the project/semester/year well? New Year’s resolutions are clichéd caricatures of making an end because people often–quite cynically–make resolutions they know they can’t keep. We think that a list of what we should have done negates all we didn’t do. Is that how auld lang syne works?