Auld Lang Sigh

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Likewise, the Millenni-Om party in Bali, planned by New York event organizer Mark Baker, was conceived as a gathering for the young and hip, and organizers secured confirmations from such celebrities as Sean Penn, the band Oasis, Johnny Depp and Kate Moss. But faced with slow sales of the 700 tickets (at $500 apiece), organizers shifted gears. "We're now promoting the event as a trip for those wanting a New Year's with a spiritual and family orientation," says coordinator Karina Suwandi. Houston socialite Lynn Wyatt canceled a trip to the Pyramids, planned four years ago, in favor of a get-together at the family ranch in South Texas. "Four years ago, going to the cradle of civilization seemed like the right thing to do," Wyatt says. "Now we want more tranquillity."

Granted that most of us don't have such options to begin with, there's still a universal theme in Wyatt's choice: the yearning for home in a helter-skelter era. This has been a millennium spent on the road. Colonizations and immigrations. Expeditions to the ocean floor, the earth's roof, the poles and the moon. Forced diasporas for populations in Africa, North America, Europe and elsewhere. Journeys across oceans for wars and police actions, and trips home in body bags. Forays around southern capes in tall ships and across Eurasia in caravans. And just as this millennium is a Western conceit, the story of the past thousand years is largely the story of the tourism of Western peoples over the span of the earth, to encroach on and economically dominate the rest of the world. If fewer representatives of the wealthiest peoples scatter to the shrines and monuments of the cultures they superseded to chant and toast one another, one doubts the ghost of Montezuma will take offense.

Like so many other aspects of this enigmatic end of the millennium--enticing and sinister, like a ticking package wrapped with a golden ribbon--the size and scope of the world's party refuses to resolve itself before the last minute. There's ample time for a backlash against the backlash as M-day draws closer and people start feeling millennial peer pressure to make impressive plans. (Even Wyatt is now thinking about adding a "big boom" to her family retreat in Texas.) But if more of us than expected end up passing the moment quietly, toasting our family and friends by the fire or the tube, does this mean we will in some way have changed, embraced the simple life, ushered in the Us millennium? More likely, we'll return in January to trade stocks, work overtime, buy DVD toasters at postholiday sales, having taken a breather between a turbulent millennium past and an uncertain one ahead. After a season of Y2K anxiety and millenarian doomsaying, condensed history and holiday hype, we should all be so lucky as to have another boring New Year's.

--Reported by Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque, David S. Jackson/Los Angeles, Elaine Marshall/Las Vegas, Mark Shuman/Chicago and Jake Sullivan/London, with other bureaus