A Cosmic Moment

By LANCE MORROW

THE MILLENNIUM IS THE COMET that crosses the calendar every thousand years. It throws off metaphysical sparks. It promises a new age, or an apocalypse. It is a magic trick that time performs, extracting a millisecond from its eternal flatness and then, poised on that transitional instant, projecting a sort of hologram that teems with the summarized life of the thousand years just passed and with visions of the thousand now to come.

The approaching millennium year 2000 is counted from the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem of Judea, in the year (so the Bible says) when Caesar Augustus decreed that a census of the world be taken. A millennial year has thus occurred only once before: fifty generations ago, in the year 1000, on what was a very different, more primitive planet earth. So this one has a strange, cosmic prestige, a quality of the almost unprecedented. The world approaches it in states of giddiness, expectation and, consciously or unconsciously, a certain anxiety. The millennium looms as civilization's most spectacular birthday, but, as it approaches, the occasion also sends out nagging threats of comeuppance.

The millennial date is an arbitrary mark on the calendar, decreed around the ^ year 525 by the calculations of an obscure monk. The celebrated 2000, a triple tumbling of naughts, gets some of its status from humanity's fascination with zeroes -- the so-called tyranny of tens that makes a neat, right-angle architecture of accumulating years, time sawed into stackable solidities, like children's blocks. And it is true, of course, that the moment may signify little to non-Christians.

Nonetheless, the millennium is freighted with immense historical symbolism and psychological power. It does not depend on objective calculation, but entirely on what people bring to it -- their hopes, their anxieties, the metaphysical focus of their attention. The millennium is essentially an event of the imagination.

Thousand-year blocks of time enforce a chastening standard of weight and scale. The millennium has a gravitational pull that draws in the largest meanings, if only because its frame of reference is so enormous. The millennial drama represents nothing less than the ritual death and rebirth of history, one thousand-year epoch yielding to another. Such imponderable masses of time overwhelm and humble the individual life-span, reducing human tragedies and accomplishments to windblown powder.

The year 2000 has long been a fixed point in the distance, a temporal horizon line. In recent years the young have begun to calculate how old they will be at the turn of the millennium. Older people have wondered if they would live to see it. The millennium has also served as a projected launch platform for humankind's most ambitious, far-reaching projects. The year 2000 would be the Year One of a better age, the decisive border at which the Future would start. Now that the destination of 2000 is approaching with a kind of dopplered urgency, people are bound to wonder what the future will look like after that. What will be the new frontier beyond 2000?

The passage into a new millennium will occur this time in the global electronic village. It will be the first (obviously, given the state of technology in the year 1000) to be observed simultaneously worldwide, with one rotation of the planet. Almost every human intelligence will be focused for an instant in a solidarity of collective wonder and vulnerability -- Mystery in the Age of Information.

The millennium is almost by definition a moment of extreme possibilities, arousing fantasies that veer wildly between earthly paradise and annihilation. "The human mind abhors a vacuum," says Michael Barkun, a political ; scientist at the University of Syracuse. "Where certainties are absent, we make do with probabilities, and where probabilities are beyond our power to calculate, we seek refuge from insupportable ignorance in a future of our own imagining."

DARK MEANINGS still reverberate like distant thunder from the last millennial passage. There was no widespread panic at the approach of the year 1000, as some writers have claimed, but an inescapable note of Armageddon was in the air. Men pondered over the text of the last days in the book of Revelation: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea" (Revelation 21: 1).

In the year 1000, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- War, Plague, Famine and Death -- were riding unimpeded. To be sure, the apocalyptic Four have a sort of chronic credibility: They have been prominent in every century. The world would be paradise indeed if they visited only at each turning of a thousand years. But in the centuries since the first millennium, zealous, punitive preachers have endlessly invoked the Four, backing up their threats of doom with Revelation.

Millennial expectations at the beginning of this century brightened, however, and for a while shone with optimism and self-confidence. The 1939 World's Fair (just before Hitler marched into Poland) was organized around the sleek theme, "Building the World of Tomorrow." In 1965 (just before the Vietnam War began in earnest), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences brought together its "Commission on the Year 2000." The chairman, sociologist Daniel Bell, declared, "The problem of the future consists in defining one's priorities and making the necessary commitments." In other words, as Barkun observes, "We get the future we are prepared for."

But in the past quarter-century millennial visions have grown darker, lurid as a Brueghel. The best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s in America was Christian author Hal Lindsey's jeremiad, The Late Great Planet Earth. Among many other things, Lindsey predicted that the Soviet Union would invade Israel and that, after millions of the righteous were gathered up in the eschatological event known as the "rapture," Jesus would descend from the heavens to preside over the real New World Order. In his 1974 book Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis, John F. Walvoord projected his vision: "Destruction on a formerly incomprehensible scale is clearly predicted for the end time in the book of Revelation and may be the result of nuclear war." Evangelist Pat Robertson has said that in the millennial age the saved will be empowered to control geologic faults spiritually and thereby prevent earthquakes.

Where science and technology once seemed to offer a redemptive promise, they have grown more problematic. As the second millennium approaches, they often appear to be agents of either nuclear destruction or materialistic overconsumption and earth poisoning. The naively shining Cities of Tomorrow have deteriorated into a vision of Blade Runner, wherein a sinister polyglot brainlessness reigns, a sort of neofeudal brutality in the air. An Italian engineer, Roberto Vacca, warned in The Coming Dark Age, "Our great technological systems of human organization and association are continuously outgrowing ordered control ((and)) are now reaching critical dimensions of instability." The Club of Rome described The Limits of Growth in neo- Malthusian terms, reaching the dismal conclusion that the earth's resources likely could not support the rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100. (Later researchers questioned the computer models on which the project was based.)

Yet the report had an effect upon global morale. Like oil spills and acid rain, it seemed to be part of the evidence of a planetary trend. In this volatile, uncertain atmosphere, the traditional antagonists, religion and science, edged toward the idea of a truce based on a concern and reverence for the endangered life of the planet. Nature ceased to be either a savage force to be conquered (science) or a lower temporal form, inferior to heaven (religion). Instead the earth came to seem an innocent and fragile victim of human excess.

The pressures of such anxieties have encouraged in some quarters an ethic of millenarian asceticism, a New Age impulse to withdraw from the older promises of the consumer society and its plenitude. Barkun predicts that the approaching millennium will bring an increasingly skeptical attitude toward gratuitous technology and a renewed attraction to life in small, self- sufficient rural communities. People will tend to cultivate spiritual and aesthetic values in opposition to material gratification. And the emotional view of the future will swing sharply back and forth, from exultant hope to bitter despair. The millennium will be the best of times. Or else it will be the worst of times. An age of unprecedented wonders will begin. Or else all % the planetary debts will come simultaneously and cataclysmically due. Either/ Or.

The year 1991 brought the disintegration of the Soviet Union and with it the effective end -- for the moment -- of the world's nuclear nightmares. But still it seemed that the slower-working apocalypses of vanishing ozone and overpopulation and world hunger and AIDS were menacingly clustered around the end of the millennium. Perhaps the world's imagination needs an agenda of dooms, if only to make it focus upon its New Millennium resolutions. So all Four Horsemen seem to be up and riding again, joined possibly by the environmental Fifth. And if 1991 was just another year, what astonishments will arrive in 2000?

We like to say that time will tell. But time is elastic and mysterious and, in its wild, undifferentiated state, uninhabitable by humans. Life needs its days and nights, its waking and sleeping, its seasons, its routines, its appointment books. People organize their lives by drawing lines, segmenting time, measuring their progress -- clocking themselves. Time is the organizing principle of conscious human effort. It may be difficult to understand sometimes, but it is what we have, all we have, the medium in which we swim.

In that lies the meaning of the millennium. Delineated time is history's narrative framework -- the way to make sense out of beginnings, middles and ends. Everyone is born, and dies, in the middle of history's larger story. The millennium is a chance (the rarest) to see, or to imagine that we see, the greater human story, filed in the file drawer with a click of completeness. Envisioning the end of one era and the beginning of another somehow infuses life with narrative meaning. And surviving the millennial passage, for those who do, may even have about it a wistful savor of the afterlife.