Happy 2000, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar!
Happy 2000, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, eastern Dem. Rep. of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, and South Africa!
Happy 2000, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, FYROM, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Niger, Chad, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Gabon, Sao Tome, Republic of the Congo, Western DRC, Angola, Namibia.
Happy 2000, United Kingdom, Ireland, Iceland, Portugal, Morocco, Canary Islands, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Burkino Faso, Ghana, Togo!
Happy 2000, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Guyana, western Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile!
Happy 2000, New York!
Happy 2000, Quebec, Toronto, Eastern United States, the Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru!
Happy 2000, Winnipeg, Chicago, Dallas!
Happy 2000, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Easter Island!
The New York Times (January 1, 2000)
1/1/00: Around the world –
Slowly, slowly, slowly, the year’s first dawn
By Seth Mydans
The first to greet the new day on Taveuni Island were the birds, singing from the treetops at the ocean’s edge, skimming along the surf, filling the pale pre-dawn with celebration.
As the glittering surface of the ocean turned from black to iron gray to silver, a flock of crimson lorys landed for just a moment on the red fronds of an umbrella tree, then disappeared.
Spiky white-and-pink blossoms from an overhanging poison-fish tree plopped into the hissing surf. A family of crabs crawled carefully up the rocky shore. Inevitably, roosters crowed.
Silhouetted among the spiky coconut palms, villagers gathered at the shoreline to watch the new year’s first dawn, here in the South Pacific. From Tuvalu to Fiji to Tonga to the little islands off the coast of New Zealand, the sun was rising along the international dateline, almost a full day before it would rise in New York.
This small island of 12,000 people is one of the few landfalls along the 180-degree meridian, the basis for the international dateline and the farthest point from the 0-degree meridian at Greenwich, England.
As they gathered at the island’s eastern edge, some of the villagers sat quietly, wrapped in blankets, staring at the horizon. Others were still rowdy from their midnight celebrations, wading out, laughing, into the shallow surf.
A young man named Naibuku Petersen blew a whistle and shouted, “I love the weather!” A small van raced by in a cloud of dust, its driver honking and whooping. Someone fired a skyrocket into the air.
But as dawn approached and the sharp sliver of moon began to fade, the people along the shoreline grew quieter.
The sky became pale, with hints of blue and green and pink, suggesting a dazzling sunrise to come. A streak of gold appeared above a cluster of blue-gray clouds on the horizon.
“It’s coming up now!” someone shouted.
But behind the clouds, the sun seemed to pause, even as the sky around it lightened and the smooth sea sparkled. For a while, it seemed that this would be a day without a sunrise.
Without its sharp rays, the world turned dove gray – the sea, the clouds, the distant island of Qamea. Even the sea breeze had a soft, dove-gray feel.
The moment of sunrise had arrived, just before 6:30 a.m. But still there was no sun.
“It may be feeling shy to come up because so many people are watching,” said Elizabeth Pickering, 51, who wore a traditional wraparound skirt and a white gardenia behind her ear.
An ornate cluster of clouds huddled closer around the sun, as if to shield it.
“The clouds refuse to move,” Mrs. Pickering said. “Although the breeze is there – the wind – but they are just staying there.”
And the watchers also stayed along the rocky shoreline as the rest of the world around them brightened into day, but still without a sunrise.
A half hour had passed beyond the appointed moment.
“It’s teasing us this morning,” said a woman named Mary Erasito.
The sun, it seemed, was preparing a grand entrance, an overpowering debut more elegant than the showiness of a textbook sunrise.
First it fringed the sheltering clouds with a rim of light. Then it turned them milky gray.
And then, just past 7 a.m., it burst through above them, blinding silver, emperor of a new century. And people began to shout, “Look at it! Look at it!”
Mrs. Pickering shouted too: “It’s laughing at us!”
Fra Hill, 57, a local silk-screen artist, kissed her hands and held them out to the sun. She was crying.
“It’s just looking and twinkling at me,” she said. “I’ve got it. And it’s got me. It can’t get better than that. It just came out full-blown. It’s smiling, it feels so good. I’m so happy.”
She stared directly into the bright, white sun.
“This is one chance in 1,000, and I’ve got it, I’ve captured it,” she said. “It’s beautiful, an oval shape, and there’s a curve underneath and it’s bluish. Oh, it’s beautiful and you see the whole beautiful face of it, like a mirror, like a diamond, round and beautiful.”
1/1/00: Around the world –
Ancient temple in Tokyo rings in just a new year
By Howard W. French
As the monks in their long black robes and golden sashes put the finishing touches on preparations for the New Year celebrations here, there was little room for doubt that this was a big day for Zojoji Temple, one of Tokyo’s great Buddhist houses of worship.
There was the altar to be prepared in front of the huge bronze bell to be sounded 108 times to relieve the soul of its many agonies and frustrations.
There was the huge tarpaulin-like collection vessel to be strung up and secured to gather in the many pounds of coins to be tossed in offering. And there were the helium balloons to be filled that at the right moment would carry people’s prayers skyward.
But as that moment drew near, conversations with the people who filled the sprawling grounds of the huge complex to the bursting point made clear that for Japanese, from the Buddhist cleric to the high school lovebirds strolling arm in arm, the celebration of the New Year, always a huge event for the nation’s Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, was only incidentally related to the global hoopla about the year 2000.
Almost every aspect of the millennium events here bore reminders that Japan, more than any other place on earth, has managed to absorb all of the outward trappings of the Western world while at the same time remaining profoundly, and quite proudly, different.
Indeed, the Tokyo television tower, a replica of the Eiffel Tower that glowed brightly close by at the stroke of midnight, seemed like a neon advertisement of the dichotomy, as visitors crowding the temple grounds snatched up the last of the white arrows on sale there to be hung in the home to ward off evil, while clerics blew the reedy, ancient court music, or gagaku, from their flutes.
And then there was the sermon delivered by Kyoshin Todo, the elaborately robed head monk of this temple, which was founded in 880.
“It has been 1999 years since the birth of Christ, but Buddha was living long before then,” he said, stooping deeply as he clutched a long white hairy whisk. “We have all – whether Japanese or Chinese or Indian Buddhists – gone over to keeping dates this way. If the Buddha were alive today, what would he think?
“He wouldn’t say anything, because he has a huge heart. And that is what God is trying to teach us, that we must accept each other.”
In fact, Japanese have a wide variety of choices for keeping calendars, from the birth of Buddha, in 563 B.C., to the imperial-based date system still in official use. This year is Heisei 12, the 12th year of Emperor Akihito’s reign, according to that method.
There are others, too, from the traditional Chinese lunar calendar to the Shinto dating system, whose count begins with the reign of Jimmu, the mythical, divinely born first emperor, starting in 660 B.C. The celebration of the new year on January 1 only began with the introduction of the Gregorian calendar and other Western inventions under the Meiji Restoration of 1868.
Still, the little lecture, which seemed in part a mild reproach to Asians for having forsaken many of their traditions for Western ways, seemed almost redundant, judging from the comments of those who flocked here. Almost none of them said they regarded the start of the new year as an entry into a new era in the first place.
“Mill, millen, millennium,” Yaeko Mizoguchi, a 60-year-old woman said, laughing as she struggled with the word borrowed from English. “We are Japanese. It is too hard to pronounce, and we cannot be bothered with it anyway.”
Her husband, Mutsumi Mizoguchi, 63, a retired engineer, added: “We have our own culture to live in, just as Americans have theirs. We enjoy our own traditions, our own flags, our own songs. When you celebrate your own culture properly, then you can go forth into the world proudly.”
The couple said they had been celebrating the New Year in the same way all their lives. But young couples who turned out here in large numbers showed no greater interest in the millennium and no less fidelity to this country’s traditions.
Buddhism came to Japan from China and Korea in the sixth century and gradually took its place alongside Shinto, the ancient indigenous animistic religion, as one of the country’s two principal forms of worship. Although it has not always been the case, the two now live in a sort of easy cohabitation.
Japanese pick and choose which of the two religions to use to mark important moments during the year, often on the basis of nothing more spiritual than which temple or shrine is closest to their homes.
“To be honest, we don’t have much faith,” said Yukio Hoshi, 28, a salaryman who came to the temple to make New Year’s wishes with his girlfriend, Akiko Kuji. “More than anything else, we’ve come here out of habit. This is how you celebrate occasions like this in Japan.”
At a long table provided for the occasion, the couple carefully filled out cards listing their wishes for the new year and then joined the long line to enter the temple where a golden Buddha sat atop a richly decorated altar. Their wishes? “Health for our families, success in work and happiness together,” said Miss Kuji, 25, tugging a blanket around her shoulders against the cold.
For most young couples, Christmas is the biggest time for year-end parties. New Year’s, by contrast, is traditionally a quiet, contemplative holiday, when ancestors are remembered, people seek atonement and make new wishes, and families draw close.
“At this time of year I believe Japanese are seeking renewal and spiritual refreshment,” said Nichihiro Kuya, a monk who is director of publications for Zojoji Temple. “That’s pretty much the same thing that Westerners are seeking too, isn’t it?”
Asked how he felt about the ease with which Japanese people switch among religions, including Christianity, which claims less than 1 percent of the population as regular worshipers but whose wedding rites are wildly popular here, he managed to find a virtue. “Japanese have a history of flexibility, and will accept anything if they think it is good, whether it is Buddhist, Shinto or a Christian-style wedding,” he said. “Of course we would like as many believers as possible for our sect, but this adaptability is a strong point of our culture.”
1/1/00: Around the world –
Keeping his promise, pope opens new year
By Alessandra Stanley
John Paul II gave his first blessing of the Year 2000 as fireworks exploded and church bells tolled, ushering in the new year across Rome.
“As we cross the threshold of the new year, I would like to knock at the door of every home, to bring to each of you my cordial good wishes,” the pope said to about 100,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s Square beneath his study window, many holding up torches and candles.
After he spoke, the crowd erupted in cheers and applause.
In past years, the pope has not made a midnight appearance on New Year’s Eve, preferring to perform an evening vespers service, and then get a good night’s sleep before a January 1 Mass.
But this New Year’s Eve falls at the start of a Holy Year for the Roman Catholic Church, one that commemorates the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Christ. Ever since he was elected in 1978, the pope has said he has been looking forward to the moment when he would lead the faithful into the third millennium.
And people came from all over the world to witness the moment.
“We thought this would be memorable, not only for the Christian meaning, but because Rome was the center of civilization 2,000 years ago,” said Rory Conway, 21, a New Yorker.
At a vespers service this evening, the ailing 79-year-old pope glided up the aisle of St. Peter’s Basilica, his hands clutching the handle of a wheeled staircase pushed by his aides. It was the second time this week that he has used the device, which helps him preserve his strength and also allows the crowds to get a better glimpse of him.
He gave thanks to God in his homily but also asked for forgiveness. “Let us ask for pardon because too often, alas, the conquests of science and technology, so important to real human progress, are used against mankind.”
Normally, the pope retires to his country residence of Castel Gandolfo outside of Rome to rest between Christmas and New Year’s. This year, despite his fragile health, the pontiff elected to stay at the Vatican to remain close to the religious pilgrims who traveled to Rome for the Holy Year. On Saturday, he will open the holy door of Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica, and celebrate Mass there.
Before the pope appeared, the waiting crowds were entertained by a multicultural concert which included from Queen Esther Marrow, a Harlem gospel singer, a choir of 5,000 children from various countries around the world, and Italian pop singer Claudio Baglioni.
In tonight’s homily, the pope cited the discovery of America, “which initiated a new era in the history of humanity,” as a key development of the last 1,000 years.
1/1/00: Around the world –
Marking time in a place without calendars
By Rachel L. Swarns
The red sun was falling, the cooking fires were burning and the village elder’s naked shoulders were shivering in the afternoon cool as he described the eagerly awaited arrival of the new year.
“When the thunderstorms start and the leaves grow from the ground, that’s how we know it’s the new year,” said Maverihepisa Koruhama, wrinkling his brow as he tried to calculate the auspicious date.
“This time,” he said finally, “the new year came about one month ago.”
Here in this tiny village of mud huts and wildflowers, in the craggy, arid hills of northwest Namibia, there are no calendars, no electricity and no words in the native language for millennium, computer or Y2K. A telephone is a three-hour drive away.
As the modern world celebrated the coming of 2000 with confetti and champagne, the Himba people started and ended their day much as they have for nearly 300 years, whistling to their goats, milking their cows and sleeping with the sun.
These nomadic shepherds in this remote corner of the world stand as living links between the old world and the new, walking proudly with their age-old traditions into the new century.
They measure time by the shifting sun and mark the coming of the new year with the arrival of seasonal rains that transform the parched red soil here into a carpet of green. (In their Herero language, the word for “day” is the same as the word for “sun,” and the word for “year” means “rain.”)
Mr. Koruhama said his family had never heard of the year 2000 – or the year 1999, for that matter – because the Himba do not use numbers to count years.
But he watched proudly today as his young sons chased wayward cattle and his three wives soured milk for butter, as their ancestors did when they came to this region centuries ago from what is now Angola.
“Today is a day like any other,” said Mr. Koruhama, amused by a foreign visitor’s questions. “My father and my grandfathers, they were surviving from goats and cattle. That is what I am doing today. And I am teaching my children to look after cattle. That is our way. That is our future.”
But the challenges confronting the estimated 7,000 to 10,000 Himba who hope to carry the old ways into the future are great.
Already, the modern world is beginning to touch isolated villages like this one in Kaokoland, where the huts in the hills are accessible only on foot or in vehicles with four-wheel drive.
The Himba have begun to send some of their children far away to school, and some come home wearing Reebok baseball caps along with their traditional loincloths. In some places, shepherds trade goats for bright yellow tarpaulins to protect their mud roofs from leaks.
Some Himba have left their villages altogether, turning their backs on the ways of their community, where bare-breasted women still stain their skin with glossy red ochre and men still cover their long hair in turban-like wraps.
“Some of my extended family, they’ve left and gone to the towns,” said Kamukazona Koruhama, Mr. Koruhama’s sister-in-law.
“They change the way they dress, the way they look,” she said sadly. “They don’t come back. It’s many, many Himba people living now in towns. People are asking: ‘Why do they leave? Why do they move to the place that belongs to other people? Why don’t they come back?’”
For the family of Mr. Koruhama, it is difficult to understand. They cannot understand the appeal of the western way of life. People in town often forget the old ways, they warn their children.
Will they remember that the boiled root of the sour plum tree cures diarrhea, their parents ask. Or that the mopane tree makes the best firewood? Or that one cannot communicate with the ancestors without the sacred fire that burns in every village?
“Move to town?” repeated Mr. Koruhama, scoffing at the idea that his children might someday leave his village. “That doesn’t make any sense. Goats are afraid of cars. How will the goats live in town with all the cars down there?”
But change is coming.
The Namibian government is determined to develop their remote region, starting with a $550 million dam on the border with Angola that would flood the grazing grounds of 1,000 people and 100 ancestral graves while providing the country with much-needed power.
The project – still in the planning stages – would bring thousands of workers to Kaoakoland, and with them the benefits of electricity, roads and clinics as well as the problems of prostitution and AIDS, government officials acknowledge.
“That is the only region in Namibia that is completely in darkness, no roads, no infrastructure, nothing,” said Paulinus Shilamba, director of energy for the Ministry of Mines and Energy here.
“This project will change the whole face of that region,” Mr. Shilamba said. “The present culture of the Himba people will gradually disappear. The Himba will change. They will get cars, get jobs and go to school like everyone else. In my mind, that’s better.”
Advocates for the Himba are battling the plan, saying it would irreparably damage what is regarded as one of southern Africa’s most successful, self-sufficient tribes.
But Zepauandoui Tjambiru Koruhama, another of Mr. Koruhama’s sisters-in-law who lives nearby, believe some change is good.
She is a traditional wife. She covers her body with ochre and butterfat every morning and prays to her ancestors. She wears a conch shell around her neck and calf-skins to cover her hips. She knows her year of birth by its proper name, based on its most significant event.
“I was born in the year of my great-grandfather’s death,” she said.
She has never heard of New York or America and has no idea who won this country’s presidential election, which was held last month. She has eight children and many more cows to manage. Her life is full.
But it is also very hard, and she does not romanticize it.
During the dry season, when water is scarce, her family moves as many as 10 times, searching for grass for the cattle to eat.
Even during the rainy season, the soil is often too dry to grow corn or other vegetables, and her family must often subsist on milk.
“These are hard ways, the same hard ways of my grandmothers,” she said.
So she and her husband decided to compromise. One son would tend the sheep in the traditional fashion. Another boy would go to school, to learn English and modern ways. And every year now, her husband trades three goats to cover the annual school fees.
This week, the boy, Aaron, was at home from school on break, wearing an Adidas jacket and faded Puma sneakers. He is about 17 (most Himba do not know their exact ages), and he knows all about the millennium.
In 2000, he says, he hopes to get a job, buy a car, help his family. He says he will make his life in a city somewhere, not here.
“I want to get money to help my mother and father, to buy food, to buy blankets for them,” he said.
His mother listens to him quietly and then sends him off to tend the cattle. She prays he will work for a while and then return home to his traditions.
“He says now these new ways are so beautiful, but I hope someday he will realize it’s not the best way,” she said, sighing. “But I can’t see the future. Only the ancestors know what the new rains will bring.”
1/1/00: Around the world –
Parties on the beach, then pious reflection
By Larry Rohter
The land that made Carnival and the samba art forms loves nothing more than a party. So the beginning of the 2000s in Rio de Janeiro turned into what authorities proudly called the largest celebration in Brazilian history: an estimated 3.5 million people lining Copacabana, Ipanema and more than 25 miles of other beaches in a tropical spectacle that blended the spiritual and the profane.
For believers of Candomble, Brazil’s home-grown mixture of Catholicism and African-derived animist beliefs, New Year’s Eve is traditionally the feast day of Iemanja, the fair-skinned goddess of the sea who appears in the guise of the Virgin Mary and is considered the mother of all living things. Beaches are always packed with worshipers who come to seek her blessing on that night, but with the celebration of the millennium, everything that has gone on in the past was multiplied.
The day had been cloudless and sunny; the hottest of the summer so far. Rio’s beaches were crowded with sunbathers, surfers and volleyball and paddle ball players.
But as the sun dipped over Gavea Peak and sank into the sea, the sportsmen retired, a cooling breeze sprang up, and individuals, couples and entire families began emerging from apartments, restaurants, buses or the subway and streaming to the shore.
To turn away from the sea was to glimpse silhouetted figures clinking their glasses, dancing and kissing as they watched the goings-on from the verandas of million-dollar apartments in Ipanema.
At the water’s edge, though, the scene was largely one of piety, as devotees of Iemanja stood quietly, their heads bowed and arms outstretched, and prayed.
Men and women alike were dressed entirely in white in deference to the goddess. Many of the bouquets of roses, lilies, carnations and gladioli they carried also were white, and were ceremoniously thrown into the Atlantic as offerings to her. Other worshipers tossed wads of money or even pieces of jewelry into the sea in her honor, or let the waves wash over them.
“A new millennium, a new start,” said Maria Zenaida Rodrigues Alves as she emerged soaked from the surf. “I have washed away my sins and the Lady of the Sea has made me a new person.”
Delia Correia Costa put it another way: “If we cleanse ourselves at the start of this new millennium, then maybe the world can also be cleansed and we can usher in an era of universal peace and harmony.”
Similar celebrations were going on in other cities along Brazil’s 4,000 miles of coastline, but Copacabana was clearly the focal point of the nation’s festivities.
A half-dozen cruise ships and assorted yachts and sailboats floated just offshore, hundreds of jet-setters and political dignitaries joined President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in a special tent set up at Fort Copacabana, and some of Brazil’s most renowned pop music stars performed on stages that had been erected at four points along the beach. To cap things off, an ornate 20-minute fireworks display began promptly at midnight.
For some of the working poor, though, the night was primarily a chance to make a little money. They circulated among the revelers, selling coconuts, ears of corn, beer, soft drinks and even bottles of Champagne. “Whether it is 1999 or 2000, I still have to put food in the mouths of my children,” said Jose Ovidio Ramos Mendonca, a vendor of grilled meats. “I can always rest tomorrow.”
1/1/00: Around the world –
Past, present and future in one stroke
By Richard Eder
“But where are the snows of yesteryear?” the poet Francois Villon asked in the 15th century, not even halfway through the millennium we are making a fuss about leaving. Nothing new under the sun, though in his case it was not an early global-warming alert but a lament for departed loveliness. Nothing new there either.
Maybe the past is prologue, but here at the changing of the hundred- and thousand-year guard, prologue is chiefly the past. The flood of writing on the subject, including this additional teacupful, looks back more than forward. “Millennium” has a great gong sound, but is it the gong announcing the end of an era or summoning the one to come? The first is bronze, the second is tin.
If the past is another country where things are done differently, as L. P. Hartley put it, at least it is a country, with features, memories good and bad and maybe lessons to be drawn. The future is no country at all. At best it is a reservation made through a fly-by-night travel agency that may send us quite otherwise than we’d planned, or go out of business overnight and no refunds.
History, we are told, is the use the present makes of the past for the sake of the future. This millennial looking-ahead is the use the present makes of the future for the sake of the past – to salute or at least to confirm it. Hey, we call out ahead to the year 3000 while stuffing a time capsule with our bric-a-brac and bright ideas: This is where we are and what we’ve done with the thousand years just gone. Show-and-tell time. Please grade.
Of course it is a notional plea. Having asked what truth was, jesting Pilate didn’t stay for an answer. We won’t arrive for one. Prophecy itself is a judgment on today, not tomorrow, a judgment seasoned with triumphalism or foreboding, depending on who we are and have been, and much less on what we foresee. Reading entrails is most likely an older form of vaticination than reading stars. Even stargazing is reading what happened millions of years ago.
Insofar as it casts ahead, “millennium” is a large package for not very large thoughts. They rattle. Arranging this shindig, we’ve rented a banquet hall for a takeout lunch; a journalistic arrangement, among other things. So was the original “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” Some of the more facile examples of this prophetic bridge-building are not far from “Yes, Virginia, there is a future.” Who knows, maybe the millennium will fall under Andy Warhol’s rule: famous for 15 minutes.
Perhaps the way to think about the 2000s is to let the thousands go and fix upon the two. (That was my wife’s suggestion; but then, as a painter of landscapes and figures, she works to conjure past and future in one stroke of the present.) What will next year and the year after be like? That is quite a lot, even a terrifying lot, considering the speeding-up of change. Terrifying to a sexagenarian entrails-reader, that is; much less or even not at all to his grandchildren.
But what about the grandchildren? A note or two from a foreboder:
Deterioration of place. Chat rooms that are nowhere, e-marketing that is nowhere and may end up contributing nothing, in the way of taxes, to the upkeep of the pavements we nonvirtually walk upon. (Why walk, of course, when we can Web?) Visiting, that magic pleasure and terror (through the woods to grandfather’s house or maybe grandmother’s or maybe the wolf that ate her), becomes a riskless keystroke. For a long time we’ve had 800 numbers that are nowhere and will-o’-the-wisp mortgages that flit from place to place around the continent. Nowhere is not quite it: all of it is somewhere, only the somewhere is all one same climate-controlled cubicle and gray-white keyboard.
Deterioration of time, specifically the progressions of time embodied in the generations. There are still parents and grandparents, and a child can still draw on particular experience, tempers and stories. Youth culture tends to bypass these things. Children have always argued their contemporaries against the parental hierarchy, and a good thing, too. There was liberating growth in it. But so manipulated is it now – one part spark to ten parts marketing – that it has become a revolution that not only devours but predigests itself.
Deterioration of reality, which has always been a dialectic between what we control and what we don’t. The steel of necessity strikes the flint of invention. Not much spark to be had when necessity, supposedly bypassed, has been vanquished into a banana. Plato’s great myth told our life as the shadows cast by a fire on the walls of a cave in contrast to the reality outside. Two thousand years of civilization’s fitful exploration has been a reaching for the outside. The next thousand – until war comes or the power fails or the virtual culture produces immune rejection – more than slightly suggests an advance back into the cave’s shadows.
Villon’s ballad was a pulsing lament, a sense that we fall through time instead of ascending through it. Seeming to look backward, it is prophecy nonetheless. Today, 500 years after, the pulse beats sooner or later even in the staunchest progress believers. Arrhythmia, they may call it; for some of us it is rhythm. Whichever; more sure than any predicting about the shape and consequences of an information universe is that this pulse will beat 500 years from now. Depending, of course, on what loveliness remains to be lamented.
What the “snows of yesteryear” is really asking is: Where are the snows of next year? Ecology, pollution, warming come into it, of course, but I think of the decline of specific and unique forms in our life – snow is not the only crystal – unarranged, unmanipulated, ungeneralized and unmarketed. Also the possibility, from night to morning, of finding the world transformed and renewed by something we neither control nor are sold.
Maybe a computer feels that way when rebooted. Mine died entirely for 24 hours while I was trying to write this. Millennium takes out a critic? Computer rebels against what it is being made to say? Computer – oh, God – agreeing and shutting down in sympathy?