Who Are You in the New Millennium?

By Pico Iyer/Easter Island

Nothing but the sound of waves foaming against black volcanic rock. A man sits alone at a desk reading verses of the Bible aloud to himself. Three white crosses stand desolate atop a bare green hill. All across the empty, silent island--a kind of Polynesian Scotland--moai, or worn, hollow-eyed statues carved from volcanic stone, are staring back at the new day as if it were the old.

Did a clock in Times Square just click over? Did some great historic moment just explode in the Millennium Dome? If so, someone neglected to inform the "living faces" that preside unchallenged over the loneliest island community in the world (in the same time zone, though hardly the same century, as New York City). On New Year's Eve, grass-skirted dancers perform under fireworks in front of the ancestral figures; but come New Year's Day, all is just eerie midsummer stillness again, the only sound the wind whistling in your ears. It may be that something tumultuous happened to your laptop, or that ATM down the road; but on an island 1,300 miles from the nearest inhabited landmass (Pitcairn, pop. 65), all such disturbances pass like a distant storm at sea. "The race is not to the swift," wrote D.H. Lawrence in the past millennium, "but to those that can stand still/ and let the waves go over them."

Rapa Nui (as the locals call their island, their language and their race) is not, happily, one of the typical places on the earth; there is no desperate shortage of food or drinking water or telephones. Yet it throws a curious light on our millennial dreams. There is no place of higher education to serve the 3,000 or so residents, and mass transportation is said to consist of a bus that runs occasionally on Sundays in the summer. A 21st century luxury on this remote Chilean possession is wood. And the few foreigners who gather here to see in the new millennium do so largely in the spirit of people choosing to spend the holidays with their grandparents. All over the island, in the ceremonial sites, you see lonely, breathing figures staring out into the silence.

In place of high-speed modems or PalmPilots--which look, in this scheme of things, a little like the toys the kids got under the tree last week--Easter Island offers what humanity has always relied on: petroglyphs and taboos and ways of peopling the dark. You walk here through a landscape of atavistic myth, in what can seem a Blair Witch island. Winds from Antarctica roar over broken stone heads and toppled statues in the bare earth. In the local church, the Virgin Mary is a staring-eyed moai, and the baptismal font sits atop a carved head. "Y2K," in the blustery quiet, sounds a lot like "Why today?"

In response to that stubborn sense of mystery, visitors have characteristically tried to fill the emptiness with explanations, speculating about immigrants from outer space or heroic oarsmen from South America; foreigners see Basque influences here; and locals speak of the statues walking inland from the coast. The monoliths, thought to be between 600 and 1,300 years old, reflect back mostly the faces of those who look at them. John Dos Passos, in 1971, saw the island's parabolic cycle--the construction of extraordinarily impressive monuments, followed by their destruction--as a warning to "college radicals"; others see an allegory of limited resources (as human bodies multiplied on the island, and resources did not, people were reduced to eating one another, and after infections and slavery raids further reduced numbers, the population, in the late 19th century, sank to 110). In Paul Theroux's formulation, "Easter Island is smaller than Martha's Vineyard, and probably has fewer stony faces."

Nowadays, the local airstrip serves as an emergency-landing area for the space shuttle. And as the new millennium approaches, vans start to appear, carrying cameras from Chile (more than 2,300 miles away) to transmit the New Year's ceremonies around the world (from an island that did not know direct television four years ago). In the few cafes around town, large men with tattoos and topknots can be seen arguing passionately that the tribal leaders now bow only before the altar of money and talking heads.

Behind them, though, bare-chested neighbors with flowing red hair are galloping down the main street on chestnut horses. A girl is kissing a customer in her delight at having completed, successfully, a credit-card transaction (her first). And around a tiny graveyard of white and black and red-brown crosses, crookedly set against the sea, the moai stand, restored to their dark platforms, in front of cresting waves.

You look at the statues in the early light, and they seem to ask how much a "New Year" means a new you. What ever is deepest in us, they seem to suggest, is what doesn't change, or lend itself to explanation; in love or in worship we leave the calendar in another room. As a new millennium begins in some parts of the world, the "living faces" with their hidden eyes cannot be heard shouting, "Out with the old, and in with the new!"or "Should auld acquaintance be forgot!" Rather, they seem to murmur, "Happy New Year. Happy Old."