With the approach of a new century -- and the third millennium -- you might think people would be fixated on the future. How will 21st-century life compare to what's already happened? Where are we going as a country and world? Who will shape the years to come?
Yet browse in any bookstore nowadays and you confront the opposite preoccupation. Instead of focusing on a distant point out there on the horizon, books increasingly turn backward to bygone times of beckoning promise. For many authors and publishers, the future can wait. The end is at hand.
You might not be able to judge a book by its cover, but a title is different, more defining if not wholly descriptive. Alarmingly in recent years, the foreboding three-word phrase "the end of" has become a mantra-like opening refrain throughout the world of books.
What, specifically, is coming to an end? Alas, if we're to believe what we read on book jackets scattered across a store, just about everything. Walking the aisles, you almost feel trapped in an old New Yorker cartoon featuring a disheveled, hirsute soul carrying a sign proclaiming, "The end is near."
Within a few feet of each other, you learn about The End of Work, The End of Affluence, The End of Equality, The End of Affirmative Action, The End of Nature, The End of Evolution, The End of Reform, The End of the Nation-State, The End of Kinship, The End of Beauty, The End of Manhood, The End of Economic Man, The End of Education, The End of Science and, to be more specific, The End of Physics.
Curiously -- and possibly a sign that originality isn't what it used to be -- several books share The End of the Line as a title, and some render terminal judgments on America: The End of American Innocence, The End of American Exceptionalism, The End of the American Era, The End of the American Century and The End of the American Future. You also have The End of Comedy, The End of Tragedy and (with a certain justification) The End of Acting.
Some titles -- such as The End of Aging, The End of Racism and The End of the Third World -- seem unduly optimistic, while others -- like The End of the Future, The End of Time and The End of the World -- make planning beyond the day after tomorrow somewhat problematic.
Fictional works aren't immune to this titular virus. Television evangelist Pat Robertson's new apocalyptic novel depicts a liberal as the Antichrist and is titled -- what else? -- The End of the Age. (One reviewer pronounced, "The End of the Age is to Dante what Sterno is to The Inferno.")
For sheer finality and eye-catching chutzpah, The End of History and the Last Man stands out on book shelves in bold relief. Although author Francis Fukuyama explains that the concept of "the end of history" comes from the German philosopher Hegel and is not to be taken literally, this best-selling study of America and the post-Cold War world is credited -- or blamed -- within publishing circles for lighting the fuse that's led to the current explosion in crack-of-doom titles.
But marketing hype and blockbuster dreams tell only part of the story for what trend-watchers quaintly call "endism." Poll after poll consistently reveals the public's opinion that the country is going in the wrong direction. A cumulative effect of this perception is a drawing into question of some deeply-rooted American traits, including a sunny outlook about the future.
Our rendezvous-with-destiny spirit seems to have gone the way of the Studebaker. Looking back to brighter days of hopeful optimism is more reassuring than trying to look ahead.
These uncertain and chancy times, with their discombobulating economic, political and social change, also play their part in the darkening mood. Traditional patterns are breaking before new ones form, so it's easier (and perhaps more comforting) to describe what was instead of what might be.
Moreover, adding to this here-and-now anxiety is the historic angst that comes with the final years of any century. Feet-on-the-ground common sense notwithstanding, jitters always abound during a century's last decade.
Indeed, the 1990s are twice cursed. We not only have to cope with fin de siecle handwringing, but the new millennium also looms. For many worrywarts possessed with millennial fears, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are already saddled up and galloping this way.
But where, for heaven's sake, does all this fretting take us? Doesn't this wallowing in endings, happy or otherwise, seem rather out of character in a place history textbooks still refer to as the New World? It might be the wishful thinking of an unreconstructed optimist, but on a future visit to a bookstore I wouldn't mind discovering a volume bearing this alluring title: The End of The End.