It's official: Despite all the premillennial hoopla, time, like an ever-rolling stream, is still rolling along. The world did not end last week after all; global communications did not break down; and nobody needed those carefully stored bottles of drinking water.A sense of postmillennial ennui in fact began just as soon as the first fireworks exploded somewhere in the western Pacific last Saturday morning. Forty minutes after a raucous, star-spangled midnight in New York, Times Square was rapidly emptying out. Here in Tokyo, people got up again after a late night of celebrating to discover that the world looked much as it had on Friday, if in slightly greater need of a garbage pickup. One week later, Y2K, once the hottest media issue around, is as cold as ashes. Everyone is back at work, no doubt wondering what all the fuss was about.
Time, of course, is like that, always ready to douse our petty moments of excitement with the cold water of the morning after. Nothing stops its relentless flow, from the death of kings to the demise of empires, from the end of a world war to the end of "Peanuts." It is with good reason that we reassure someone overwhelmed with grief or loss, "It's not the end of the world" -- although that is exactly how it seems at the time. And the classic fairy-tale sign-off -- "they lived happily ever after" -- is as much a nod to the simple assurance of continuity as to the much chancier promise of happiness. As Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman reminded us, if there is one thing as certain in this world as death and taxes, it is that time goes by.
There are various ways to take this granite fact. Poets, mystics and philosophers -- humanity's most highly sensitized and articulate spokespeople -- are generally convinced that time's meaningless flow can be transcended and infused with meaning by lightning-flashes of illumination. "Spots of time," the poet William Wordsworth called them: moments that could change a life, or at least, when remembered in tranquillity, define it.