The evocative power of summer nights in northern latitudes is intense.

Different climates, like different constructions of reality, fuse so completely with how we experience our lives that we are like fish in water.

When I lived in Hawaii, I missed the first chill in the air that came in mid-summer, an intimation that long daylight might not last forever. An intimation that the luminous humid darkness of this particular summer night is an unappreciated gift.

Why are so many feelings interlaced with memories of summer nights? And why am I sitting at two in the morning in front of a computer when the sky is clear, Scorpius is rising, and the warm night is an invitation to go outside and do nothing, absolutely nothing, while the symbols of the universe written in the sky say more than I want to know of what's passed and passing and to come?

Memories in their molecular matrix trigger chemicals that make me wistful. I remember the smell of the summer hair of the first girl I loved. I remember a night in a back yard behind the home of an uncle and aunt, surrogate parents that I visited in southern Indiana, their neighbors visiting and the hollyhocks growing wild and how it felt to dream to sleep with their warm house around me. And I remember summer in the city, a promise of excitement that was always kept.

Memories … I remember Deckard in Blade Runner, murmuring "Memories. You're talking about memories." Trying to grasp that memories implanted in replicants cushioned the shock of their brief lives.

These memories of which I am writing are not memories at all. They are digital images coupling with your own. Those stars in the summer sky are pixels darkening on your monitor. Or ink squeezed onto a white page by a printer. The moment these words are written and sent into cyberspace, they become part of something else. Part of a different molecular matrix, part of a larger mind.

Memories … cushioning the shock of our brief lives.

The digital world that so many of us loved just a few years ago is already gone. It has become the ubiquitous sub-text of our lives.

These days, we are all in the business of the construction of reality. Literature - the creation and discovery of meaning and value - used to be a special case. Then the Romantic poets said that everyone was a poet, that all reality was "half perceived and half created," and poets simply did it a little better.

When Vance Packard told a popular audience in the fifties of "hidden persuaders" in advertisements, it was a revelation. Now we don't have to board a plane to go to Disneyland, we merely have to get out of bed. We live inside simulations, in a sanitized landscape, under which imagineers are pushing buttons, flipping switches, smothering alternative voices. They can even make things vanish.

"The Disappeared," those thousands of men and women that vanished into unmarked graves, ceased to exist, their presence no longer magnified by the minds of those who knew them. In the digital world too, we cease to exist when our images are no longer magnified or replicated.

The CIA-drugs-Contra connection, disappeared by a swarm of false assertions … the reality of UFO phenomena, disappeared into the manufacture of crazy worlds inhabited by "useful idiots" … the horror of war, disappeared into "cool" images of smart bombs smoking down chimneys … digital images insulating us from our own experience.

Leon Panetta, former Chief of Staff at the White House, said he was once awakened in the middle of the night by the Secret Service.

"A plane has crashed into the White House!"

Panetta roused himself. "What kind of plane?"

"Well, according to CNN …"

Panetta exploded. "Will you stick your head out of the window and LOOK at the plane and tell me what you see?"

Somalia was the first invasion covered by cameras and lights already on the beach to welcome soldiers wading through the surf. But the digital world is a two-edged sword. The will of the Last Great Superpower was broken by a thirty-second video-tape of a Marine dragged behind a jeep.

Outside on a summer night, the stars look still and timeless, as if nothing is exploding. Nothing disappearing.

The other night, several of our many kids came and went. The house was alive once more with their noisy life. Then they scattered again. We must have looked to them as they left as I remember that uncle and aunt in southern Indiana, an image of reassurance that stays there after they're gone.

Now I am outside, looking up at Cassiopeia. On a good night, the Andromeda galaxy is a smear of light, but beyond the reach of my telescope, galaxies explode and civilizations vanish. That house in Indiana has had several other owners now. The neighbors who came and went have moved away or died, as all of my family died. The trees they planted have grown tall, but someone else sits in their shade.

What do we know of our place in the scheme of things, of secrets kept not only by those who think they have good reasons but by the universe itself? What has the digital world done but accelerate the construction of realities, the dark bars of our locked cage?

Memories … the mystery of a molecular nexus, a biomechanical process turning into a meaningful image. The digital world is a repository for memories fading fast, oh fast, in media that flake and peel, software that can't even turn the corner of a century without a shrill hysterical shriek.

Digital dreams, under the silence of indifferent stars. The sound of footsteps far away disappearing into an imaginary house. Clocks melt, trains race out of chimneys. Email is deleted, systems go down. Yet the will to build and persist persists, life loving life, mystery and passion of which even digital images dare not dream.

July 11 1998