Word: millenniums
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Nonetheless, the millennium is freighted with immense historical symbolism and psychological power. It does not depend on objective calculation, but entirely on what people bring to it -- their hopes, their anxieties, the metaphysical focus of their attention. The millennium is essentially an event of the imagination...
Thousand-year blocks of time enforce a chastening standard of weight and scale. The millennium has a gravitational pull that draws in the largest meanings, if only because its frame of reference is so enormous. The millennial drama represents nothing less than the ritual death and rebirth of history, one thousand-year epoch yielding to another. Such imponderable masses of time overwhelm and humble the individual life-span, reducing human tragedies and accomplishments to windblown powder...
...year 2000 has long been a fixed point in the distance, a temporal horizon line. In recent years the young have begun to calculate how old they will be at the turn of the millennium. Older people have wondered if they would live to see it. The millennium has also served as a projected launch platform for humankind's most ambitious, far-reaching projects. The year 2000 would be the Year One of a better age, the decisive border at which the Future would start. Now that the destination of 2000 is approaching with a kind of dopplered urgency, people...
...passage into a new millennium will occur this time in the global electronic village. It will be the first (obviously, given the state of technology in the year 1000) to be observed simultaneously worldwide, with one rotation of the planet. Almost every human intelligence will be focused for an instant in a solidarity of collective wonder and vulnerability -- Mystery in the Age of Information...
...millennium is almost by definition a moment of extreme possibilities, arousing fantasies that veer wildly between earthly paradise and annihilation. "The human mind abhors a vacuum," says Michael Barkun, a political ; scientist at the University of Syracuse. "Where certainties are absent, we make do with probabilities, and where probabilities are beyond our power to calculate, we seek refuge from insupportable ignorance in a future of our own imagining...