Millennium Oates

Since the calendar numeral 2000 (A.D.) has little intrinsic meaning to the majority of the world's people, many of whose traditions predate the Christian era, this elevation of the Western/Christian/Caucasian millennium is embarrassingly chauvinistic; nor

Is my anemic response due to a genetic deficiency, like colorblindness or tone-deafness?

Millenarian fantasies -- the belief, the crazed hope, that the end is at hand -- spring from what we might call the Fallacy of the Round Number.

Our ''classless'' American democracy has been a fecund breeding ground for any number of millenarian sects and cults, most of which are Protestant Christian in spirit, derived from selected passages in the Gospels and in the phantasmagoric Book of

How natural then to surmise, if one is Christian and primed for the drama of salvation, that a profound significance accrues to any 1,000-year unit and that the fin de siecle is likely to be a time of perceived turbulence.

Though I lack a vision of the 21st century, however, I have been granted a vision of the idyllic 31st century, where all the men are beautiful, all the women are strong, and all the children are clones of media celebrities and favorite pets.

The Calendar's New ClothesnnBy Joyce Carol OatesnHow lonely, how isolated, how un-American and uncontemporary one is made to feel, unable to comprehend either the literal or ''symbolic'' significance of The Millennium, and wholly impervious to millennium fever.

Mindful of the ludicrous ''futuristic'' visions of the 50's, which look to sophisticated contemporary eyes like science-fiction movie sets designed by young adolescent boys, we should all be cautious, even modest, in our speculations.

The Calendar's New ClothesnnBy Joyce Carol OatesnHow lonely, how isolated, how un-American and uncontemporary one is made to feel, unable to comprehend either the literal or ''symbolic'' significance of The Millennium, and wholly impervious to mill

The more we know of the incalculable complexities of history, or what historians define as history, the less faith we have in vast, nugatory entities like the ''20th century'' and the less symbolic significance we can attach to artificial distinctions of the calendar derived from religious and political (and therefore humanly time-bound) sources.

When prophecies regarding the Second Coming proved disappointing, in the practical sense that the world seemed not to end but only just to go on, and on, with no obeisance to the calendar, the faithful did as the faithful invariably do: they reinterpreted and readjusted the terms of prophecy.

How natural then to surmise, if one is Christian and primed for the drama of salvation, that a profound significance accrues to any 1,000-year unit and that the fin de siecle is likely to be a time of perceived turbulence.