Areas of Unrest

30 December 1999 - Some Thoughts About the Millennium

QOTD: "Taureaux piscine is the only sport I have ever encountered that has only one rule: if you and the bull are in the pool at the same time, you win." - Calvin Trillin

Reading: Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

Listening to: Gavin Bryars, The Sinking of the Titanic

For anybody who actually reads this stuff at the top and thinks it's taking me an awfully long time to get through Cherry-Garrard's book, whether or not he took the worst journey in the world could be debatable, but he almost undoubtedly took the longest. I do think it's cheating when a 700 or so page book has nearly 100 pages of forwards and introductions with Roman numerals.

All of which means I will almost certainly not finish it this year, leaving me with a low total of 114 books read this year. I'm starting on my annual book list, flipping through my book journal to decide what were the gems. (I write anywhere from a paragraph to a few pages about every book I read; I do this mostly to force myself to think about my reading matter.) The list will get posted to rec.arts.books and (eventually - last year's still isn't there either come to think of it) on my home page on cinenet, so I won't put it here, but it has me thinking about list making in general.

Every year sees lists of books, movies, recordings, etc.. I'm not necessarily current enough with any of those (my book lists are based on when I read something, not when it was written) so I can't practice that art. But this year sees (albeit incorrectly) all of the best of the century and best of the millennium stuff as well. What's the point of choosing the books of the millennium? You're excluding hardly anything by doing so, as the printing press needed to come along before literacy spread to the masses. (And it's a slow process, There are still large parts of the world with literacy rates below 50%. Not even counting Hollywood.) The single book that's influenced more people than any other this millennium is one of the few that wasn't written in it. Namely, the Bible. (By the way, I am immensely curious as to how people who don't have any sort of religious education survive in literature courses. Doesn't one at least need to know the basic stories, much as one needs to recognize key figures of Greek and Roman mythology?)

There's certainly no point in my trying to write about best music of the millennium, since I know essentially nothing about music earlier than, say, the 14th century. And I'd imagine that most people's knowledge of anything earlier than roughly the mid-18th century is limited to a few of the more popular works of the Baroque era (e.g. Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Pachelbel's Canon, maybe a bit of Bach here and there).

Most influential people of the millennium? I can point to a handful of people whose views truly changed the way we think of the world, but, again, I've got a bias towards more recent times because I know too little about history before roughly the middle of the period. William the Conqueror (Battle of Hastings, 1066 and all that) is one of the few obvious names I can pull out, but history in school meandered through the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, with little before beyond learning terms like "liege" and "serf" and "fief." In the world as history texts portrayed it, the only individuals who mattered before 1500 were a handful of kings listed in tables in the back. It's easy to forget that nationhood was actually a revolutionary concept - and, not realizing that, how can one comprehend the turmoil in the Balkans? Is the current Russian war in Chechnya all that different from Catherine the Great's "Russification" of the Don Cossacks?

It's easy to do things like list the best films of the year, but how can you gauge whether any of the titles will be recognized by the average person in 20 years, never mind a hundred? Actually, if you see as few movies as I do, it's not all that easy to list the best films of the year, but that's another matter. I couldn't come up with 10 I'd even recommend, but my first few choices are easy - Genghis Blues, Free Enterprise, October Sky, and The Cradle Will Rock - and I suspect this list says far more about the oddity of my tastes than about movies in general. (I would, however, like to find a way to have everybody who has been raving about Galaxy Quest, which I thought mediocre, see Free Enterprise, which was far more original and infinitely funnier.)

There are only two things I can say with total confidence about the millennium. One is that the biggest change in the past thousand years is urbanization. Oh, sure, there were cities before - but not to the same extent nor of the same influence. The modern city grew from the fortress and the squalor inside was still a refuge from the disorder (civil and/or economic) outside. The gradual reversal of roles between city and country is the heart of social history itself.

The other thing I can say with certainty is that the millennium does not start for another year. I am not just being pedantic. I understand that the time scales are arbitrary (indeed, I've said before that I consider the year to start in September, between my birthday, Rosh Hashanah, and too many years of school). But just because measures are arbitrary doesn't mean you get to change them in the middle. You'd say I was cheating if I wore higher and higher heels every time I measured my height so I could claim I was still growing. Measures of time, like all measures of potential, require a fixed reference to be meaningful.