There's still time to cancel the party: the third millennium began without anyone noticing in 1996. Christ was born at the time of Herod's massacre of the innocents, but Herod died in 4BC, so our calendar is out by four years - though, since new centuries and millennia begin in the 1 year rather than the 0, it really began in 1997. The man responsible for this gaffe was Dionysus Exiguus, more mundanely known in English as Dennis the Short. That mistake we haven't fixed, but in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII was forced to correct Julius Caesar's faulty astronomy by deleting ten days from the calendar (a pity someone can't do the same for the ten days after Christmas this year). The Russians only adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, which is why the October Revolution actually happened in November. Speaking of Christmas, ever wondered why new years begin on January 1 rather than Christ's birthday? Dennis's fault again, but what we commemorate on each New Year's Day is not the birth of Christ but that strangely neglected religious feast, his circumcision.
All of these examples come from the interview with Stephen Jay Gould that opens Conversations about the End of Time, and show how imprecise our calculation of calendar time has been over the centuries. Our misconceptions about the millennium don't end with the calendar, though. As historian Jean Delumeau reminds us, we are mistaken in thinking of our belief in traumatic events unleashed by the year 1000 or 2000 as "millenarianism". We may worry that our PCs will crash, but this is a wholly contemporary, secular anxiety. Christian millenarianism is the belief in the institution of a thousand-year reign of earthly happiness preceding the last judgement. Its heyday, complete with witch-burnings and rabid anti-Semitism, was not the dark ages but the Renaissance.
Jean-Claude Carriere asks some searching questions about artistic depictions of time. In some Shakespeare plays, he notes, a character goes offstage and comes back several years later, even though someone else has been onstage all the time, presumably ageing in front of our eyes. And why do meals in films hardly ever take more than four or five minutes? Umberto Eco laments the decline of the subjunctive tense and the coarsening effects of its absence on our concepts of time (he also admits in passing that Nerval's Sylvie is "the text of my life"). For Eco, our fixation on the millennium is a form of interpretative paranoia, in which the most innocent phenomena are manipulated to deliver the desired meaning. No-one is safe from this condition, not even those who imagine they are denouncing it. For example: Eco writes Foucault's Pendulum as a satire on the sort of occultism that sees a hidden meaning in everything, only to be mistaken for a convinced believer in it by the publishers of The Bible Code, who ask him to write a back-cover endorsement for their piece of brainless New Age hokum.
Thankfully the interviewers don't inquire about their subjects' plans for the big night later this year. Jean-Claude Carriere quotes a passage from Emil Cioran's posthumously published Cahiers: "The angel of the Apocalypse doesn't say: `there is no more time" but `there is no time to lose."' Although Dennis the Short hadn't invented our calendar for us yet, the angel might have added: least of all any to lose on the non-event scheduled for 31 December 1999.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic