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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.