THE YEAR EMOTIONS RULED

It ought to have been evident that something very strange was going on when a middle-aged man interviewed on the morning of Princess Diana's funeral told a TV reporter that he had not wept at his own father's death, but he was weeping today. Say what? But this is the way the whole year of 1997 has gone. Every few weeks in the past 12 months, something happened to invite an emotional public reaction of mass grief, panic or elation, often wildly disproportional to the significance of the event. Most of these eruptions had little staying power, but for the moments of their blazing they were huge, sometimes frightening.

The year was a field of sudden bonfires, and a people who had thought of themselves as remote and isolated from one another at first coalesced around the news and then became the news. Emotions were bulletins. It was a year, in fact, in which however moving or compelling were external events, the public's responses to them were more powerful still. We wept in vast numbers, we cheered, we gasped, and we could not take our eyes off ourselves.

None of the year's mass responses could hold a candle in scope and complexity to the astonishing grief inspired by Princess Diana's car-accident death, of course. (There were even spin-off mass responses of rage toward the paparazzi, who trailed her car into the Paris tunnel, and of generosity toward the charities the princess sponsored.) But other major displays of widespread feeling occurred in the sorrow at the death of Mother Teresa, the anger at both verdicts in the Boston "au pair trial" of Louise Woodward, and the celebration at the birth of the McCaughey septuplets in Des Moines, Iowa. And there were several more limited upheavals, no less intense.

Not that these events did not merit genuine interest and concern or that there were no valid reasons for the emotional expressions that followed them. But these responses seemed so much more dramatic than usual, and so determinedly public. What was not openly displayed was deemed not to exist. When Diana died, the traditionally stiff-upper-lipped royal family was exhorted by placards to SHOW US YOU CARE.

What was it about this particular year that had so many people running in hysterical packs? Were these mass demonstrations brought on by apocalyptic, fin-de-siecle anxieties about the approaching millennium? By a general frustration with emotional detachments that have characterized recent years? Or by suppressed feelings about other, hidden things that erupted geyser-like in reaction to the news?

Even relatively small and local events evoked or involved heightened group responses. A heave of national paranoia resurfaced on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell, N.M., flying-saucer incident. So certain were an astounding number of Americans that a saucer did indeed crash in the desert near Roswell in 1947 that the Army Air Force command in Fort Worth, Texas, issued an explanation at the time that the vehicle in question had been a weather balloon. This past June, to keep the public calm, the Army published reassuring photos in the papers.