The Year 2000

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Certain expressions can be rendered only in French. Esprit de corps. Joie de vivre. Cherchez la femme. Croissant. They don't really work in translation. And that is true of fin de siecle. "End of the century" sounds flat and clunky. It doesn't carry the suggestion conveyed by the original of hectic decay and a sort of perfumed dying fall.

When the expression fin de siecle first appeared in France roughly 100 years ago, it meant modern and up-to-date, but it quickly acquired a very negative connotation, and people spoke of a sickness -- la maladie de fin de siecle. The term was applied to anything thought to be corrupt, febrile, degenerate.

What some people called decadent, others called modern. The Fauve painter Andre Derain complained that "we are the mushrooms on ancient dunghills." But the dunghills produced the art and literature of the modern age, with their deliberate and unprecedented break from history and tradition.

In the optimistic, progress-obsessed U.S., the fin de siecle had a different tone and temper. The new century seemed to be the new frontier, and predictions about what it would bring were rampant. Many were accurate, from airplanes to television to freeways to disposable bottles. There were some howlers as well, including the forecast that autos would make streets as quiet as country lanes, that there would be no trees left in America by 1920, and that by the end of the 20th century, blacks would constitute about two-thirds of the U.S. population.

No prophet could anticipate what actually did happen. So here we are, an incredible, terrible, marvelous century later, nearing our own fin de siecle -- and fin de millennium.

How do we measure up in comparison? We are beset by a whole range of discontents and confusions. For a great many, the dunghill has become a natural habitat. Derain and other observers of depravity would, in fact, be stunned by the chaos of manners and speech, by the hellish ubiquity of crime and the easy -- one might almost say the democratic -- availability of drugs; by the new varieties of decadence -- rock songs about rape and suicide, pornography at the corner newsstand, commercials for S&M clubs on your friendly cable channel, not to mention telephone sex.

The prophets of doom from the previous fin de siecle would also find much to welcome. Murky but menacing predictions by Nostradamus are widely quoted. Survivalists are digging caves. Evangelical sects are getting ready for famine, flood, comets and war to accompany the End of the Days, as outlined in the books of Daniel and Revelation.

Nevertheless, some of the most persistent forecasts of doom have so far not come true, and others keep being recalled, like defective cars. So our Cassandras have to try harder. The prospect of AIDS unchecked gets more attention than the ever growing life expectancy, and gene technology suggests nefarious experiments with life itself as much as dramatic new ways of preventing disease. We have come to distrust science. The public even seems bored with space travel, although in hindsight it may prove to be, along with the computer, the most important achievement of our century.