New Year Resolution: The Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire

A sudden jump in volume from the second floor jarred his cultivated serenity and

Bill looked up from his work on this quiet Saturday morning. In his early 50s,

the Chinese transplant of two dozen years devoted a portion of his day to copying

a hefty American English dictionary, a way by which he sought to better himself and

ally a hunger for knowledge.

 

``Kara is forever OK!'' blasted the woofer upstairs.

 

He recalled right away the blaring air as one of the pop tunes back in the early

90s when he was in college and crazy about them. At a certain point in his life,

however, the rhyming lyric in the electrifying rhythm lost its appeal. His

youthful fluid passion had hardened. Literally fitting ``is forever'' between

the two syllables of the Japanese word for karaoke (translated into Chinese),

the twisted phrase itself no longer made sense to him. And he started to feel

ashamed for letting pop music cheat his time.

 

On top of that, anything dubbed ``forever'' these days was likely automatically

replaced by ``BS'' before reaching the cynical left hemisphere of his brain. As

the song played on, traces of warmth spred from his temples to cheeks as his

blush deepened: ``They boiled sugared hogwash into ear candy and I made a fool of

myself and lapped it up.'' It suddenly became hard to sit still. He loaded a few books

in the panier bags of his ebike and sped out.

 

At the library, he returned the four Michael Dibdin mysteries which he re-read

over the Christmas break and picked up from the shelf the author's last story

``End Games.'' Sure he had read it before, maybe more than once, but Bill's

style had always been to trust the word of mouth and explore familiar fertile

grounds for new thrills.

 

This time, he was impressed first by the edition notice which noted that the

copyright was held by Dibdin's estate as of 2007, the year he died. ``An estate

is how a writer leaves a legacy'' struck Bill. On the opposite page were three

sentences on how one Alaric was buried by his barbarian horde, extracted from

the ``Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' by Edward Gibbon. This discovery

sent Bill down the non-fiction section for the title. He heard of Gibbon shortly

after landed in the west and numerous times afterwards but ``End Games''

reminded him at the right time.

 

2025 just kicked off. He might as well make reading the 956-page tome part of his

new year resolution.