The Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
T S Eliot

Yesterday, I realised something. I realised it again. In fact, I realised it for the fifth or sixth time in my life, all of which have been in about the last five years. Homework and assignments are better, more interesting, less stressful and generally nicer to do if attempted about a week before the deadline. You can take them at a leisurely pace. It's not the end of the world, (or the end of your allotted time), if you can't answer certain questions straight away. You get a lovely glowy feeling if you do finish it early. And then you can continue getting further and further ahead, and give yourself breaks to watch Buffy or Angel with no dark clouds hanging over your every move. I realised this as I completed my Combinatorics homework for Monday yesterday. Then I realised it again as I looked at my Vector Analysis homework this morning. And I resolved to keep it always in this pattern.

I resolved to keep ahead in my GCSE's. It worked to start with. Eventually I came back to night before chaos. I resolved to keep ahead in my A-levels, and largely succeeded, leading to a cheerful period of my life. I resolved to do it at the start of university, and slackened gradually over the first year. So at 14, 16 and 18 years of age I decided to do this. And here, at 19, I was learning it again.

So, if anyone is still reading, what does this have to do with the Buffyverse? Well, my epiphanies are multiple. I can realise something truthful, helpful, instructional, and then fall into the same pitfalls over and over again. In this instance, it's not a particularly terrible problem. I'm a little more stressed- but the needs must of tomorrow as a deadline sometimes forces superhuman effort. Sometimes I just get poor marks. I believe that in Buffy, as in life, our characters' epiphanies are multiple.

Sometimes you want to slap Buffy when she hides things from people. When she makes things her own little secret. Again and again and again. In less considered places than this, comments like 'Why doesn't she learn?' or 'Look where that got her last time', are prevalent.

Sometimes you want to slap Willow when she tries to control the uncontrollable, to disastrous effect. Consider 'Something Blue', her tacit help of Dawn in 'Forever', 'Bargaining', 'Once More, With Feeling', and 'Tabula Rasa'. And yet these never led Willow to the conviction that she couldn't control some things? Didn't she learn that 'what's done is done'? My answer would be 'yes'.

People have their own, individual personalities. They will fall into the same pitfalls again and again, because it is in their character to do the things that they keep repeating wrongly. Sometimes we repeat it unconsciously, (we start biting our nails again). Sometimes we tell ourselves it's going to be different this time, or it's only a one-off, (my assignment problem). But our nature is to do certain things which are not helathy for us. Just because we start doing the same things again doesn't mean that we didn't have the epiphany at the time. We realised that happiness could not be constant, but we tried to follow rules that we believed made it better for us. Each epiphany is important. Each time we learn the same lesson again, it hits us with increasing force. We failed. But practice makes perfect.

Eventually, Buffy may stop hiding things. Hiding Angel's re- ensoullment before the tomb of Acathla. Hiding Angel's return from Hell. Hiding Dawn's Keyness, and her unease over her relationship with Riley. Hiding her relationship with Spike. It's not that she hasn't learnt, in every case, that she was wrong. Every time she had an epiphany. But it needs reinforcement, like a carpet needs an occasional vacuum cleaining.

Each epiphany is important. But few epiphanies are life- changing. Eliot's character, finding their faith in 'The Journey of the Magi', 'would be glad of another death'. It is in the death of his old ways, in The Epiphany, (capitals so important here), that he is reborn to eternal life. That he sees what he believes is a fundamental truth about human life. But I am sure that his faith will remain a struggle. It is organic, not constant. It has its ebbs and flows. Sometimes he needs to recount what The Epiphany was like, so that, in the mulitple mini-epiphanies through the rest of his life, he can continue to affirm his faith.

Keep trusting that Buffy and Willow can learn and grow. They do, every time they do something wrong, even if it's a similar mistake to the one before. You must forgive, as we forgive ourselves. Because that Algebra homework will still be due tomorrow.

TCH