Here we are again at the shortest days of the year. Before the lightbulb, central heating, and a thousand other innovations over the last hundred years, humans were far more in touch with the progress of the seasons, kept time by moon, sun and stars, the winter cold and summer heat, the growing season and the arrival and departure of Orion.

Our calendar, religions and art reflect these ancient annual rounds. Think of Brueghel’s winter hunters returning in the snow, reapers in the field, harvest-time festival dances, The Four Seasons of Vivaldi, and countless poems and songs in which winter is bleak, spring reborn, autumn bittersweet.

It is hardly surprising that long before the babe in the manger humankind made tales out of seasonal markers. They lie behind the conjunction of grateful Thanksgiving and spooky Halloween in the darkening days after the autumnal equinox, festivals of light in the bleak midwinter when the deepest dark of the year has been reached and it is hoped the days will grow gradually longer, ecstatic joy as the earth is resurrected in spring from beneath its winter shroud, and the dream of perpetual, golden fecundity each summer that one hopes will last forever.

Though a strict demarcation of the death of one year and the birth of another is an artificial construct born of calendric time, we can hardly help taking stock of the year just past and looking forward to the possibilities of the one ahead. We may not stick to our resolutions, but we are almost automatically compelled to grow retrospective.

Of the paired symbols of the Old Year and New, it is not the baby that preoccupies us but Father Time with his emptying hourglass. So the lists of year’s bests are made as the year disappears in the rearview mirror. The best movies, books, songs, sporting records set, persons of the year are enumerated. Persons no longer with us recalled. For many it is the season of Joy to the World, but for almost all of us, perhaps the older we get the more so, it is also the season of Auld Lang Syne.

It is a song of memory, of remembrance. As it says, “we’ve wandered many a weary foot” and “seas between us broad have roared” since the days of old long ago. Yet for a moment we pause, before the year’s last calendar page is turned, and we think of those times, places, and people now lost to us, distant or departed — but not forgotten. And we take a cup of kindness to keep their memories alive.

It is interesting that those times and people we choose to dwell on are not those whose memory is bitter. In the film of A.S Byatt’s “Possession,” one of a pair of lovers, separated many years before, writes a final letter and says, “I have been angry for so long. And now near the end, I think of you with clear love.” So do we all, with luck, when thoughts turn to Auld Land Syne, think with love of the past.

In this mood, here is a list of those we lost in 2019 that I recall with love and affection. Two who built things of beauty — Cesar Pelli, and I.M. Pei. Public servants who did their duty with skill and decency, Justice John Paul Stevens, no-nonsense economist Alice Rivlin, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, first EPA director and deputy attorney general William Ruckleshaus who refused to bend justice for a corrupt president. Journalists who reported on them Sander Vanocur and Cokie Roberts.

Athletes who performed so skillfully as to make their athleticism an aesthetic pleasure – Frank Robinson, Bart Starr, Cliff Branch. John Bogle who created in Vanguard a low cost, less risky way for millions of ordinary savers to participate in the opportunities of a market economy,

Writers who showed us worlds we wouldn’t otherwise have imagined. Ex-CIA spook Charles McCarry took us inside Cold War intrigue, notably in his Vietnam novel “The Tears of Autumn.” Professor Samuel Hynes explicated Edwardian literature and the Auden generation, but was most famous for his memoir as a World War II fighter pilot in “Flights of Passage.” Toni Morrison who made painfully vivid the experience of black Americans. Harold Bloom who explained the wellsprings of creativity in “The Anxiety of Influence,” wrote first on the Romantics, then Yeats and Stevens, onward to Shakespeare, Gnostics, Kaballah and anything else that caught his fancy. And in the last few days, Ward Just whose novels illuminated the backstage dramas of American power, including “Echo House,” “In the City of Fear,” “An Unfinished Season,” “Exiles in the Garden,” and “A Family Trust.”

We were lucky to be entertained by band singer turned movie star Doris Day whose career woman 1960s rom-coms prompted Oscar Levant to say he’d known Day before she was a virgin. But those films, often with Rock Hudson and Tony Randall, were hilarious and provided a template for the genre taken up by Meg Ryan, Renee Zellweger, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Lopez, Sandra Bullock and many more.

Albert Finney was wonderful in everything he tried. A working class English bloke, a madman, Scrooge, Hercule Poirot, Tom Jones, a bad detective in “Gumshoe,” a good one in “Wolfen,” a less than admirable married man in “Shoot the Moon” and “Two for the Road,” a decrepit actor in “The Dresser,” an eccentric relative in “The Good Year” and “Big Fish” and the boss of Erin Brockovich.

Almost as versatile was Rip Torn, though in his later years was more often seen being hilarious than melodramatic in shows like “The Larry Sanders Show,” “Men in Black” and “30 Rock.” Bibi Andersson, one of Ingmar Bergman’s actresses, was luminous in a series of variously challenging roles. And Ron Leibman was a hardworking actor on stage, screen and TV who is probably most remembered as the Union organizer who gets inside the head of “Norma Rae.”

Finally, men who brought us unforgettable entertainment. Hal Prince produced and directed decades of Broadway musicals from “West Side Story,” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” to “Cabaret,” “Evita” and much of Stephen Sondheim’s work. Robert Evans at Paramount produced popular films and championed the work of a new generation of filmmakers — “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Urban Cowboy,” “Chinatown,” “The Godfather,” “Marathon Man,” “The Odd Couple,” “Serpico,” “Love Story.”

And Stanley Donen, began as a dancer and collaborator with Gene Kelly but went on to direct stylish films starring everyone from Debbie Reynolds to Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and Dudley Moore — “Singing in the Rain,” “Funny Face,” “Charade,” “Two for the Road,” and “Bedazzled.”

We often say of people like these that they will be missed, but by performing as they did they have guaranteed they’ll be remembered. Ave Atque Vale.