When we look back to the Virtual Dark Age, before we emerged from ourselves and the chaotic variety of infinite existence once again reclaimed our human devotions, bringing a new age of outward explorations and a new age of space travel, it is easy to see the virtual centuries as only the most recent structuring of duration, one in which all of recorded human experience became, for a time, a new way of life--following in importance the first ordering of social life with timepieces.