It’s true that the world was failing at its one task—of remaining a world. Pieces were breaking off. Seasons had become postmodern. We no longer knew where in the calendar we were by the weather. We once believed that two thousand years ago was long in the past, but then we realized it was actually quite recent—just thirty generations before us. We were still at the stage of perfecting our tools: the bronze age, the iron age, the industrial age, the computer age.
