It depends what email lists you read, what kinds of information you get.

Doomsayers still fill the Net with cries of alarm over Y2K, but more missives are arriving that show evidence of nuanced reflection. There may well be some disruption, they say, but maybe it's not the end of the world.

When the electricity went down last week, I thought of all the dire predictions of the imminence of the twilight of the gods.

One minute the lights in my office were bright, the computer screen luminous with simulated cards. I was winning at solitaire, too, a necessity before I log off for the night, when - a crackling of static - the screen flared, the lights died, and the background noise of the furnace and television downstairs disappeared.

When warm fronts and cold fronts war in November in the upper Midwest, it can be exhilarating, just before it gets serious. I had left a meeting of usability professionals earlier that evening, the sky low and moving, luminous clouds flowing over the city. My meeting-mates leaned into the wind as they pushed toward their parked cars. Garbage cans and traffic cones bounced around the pavement, signs hung crazily and clanged on their metal poles like bells. The wind was nearing seventy five miles an hour, gusting to more, so we had (technically) a hurricane. When I stopped for red lights going home, the car rocked like a cradle in the hands of a deranged parent.

But I made it home. That warm well-lighted place, that lantern-glow in the blowing dark, was an archetypal cave. Coming inside from the garage, I slammed the door and shut out the threat of chaos that lives just under the skin of every facsimile of ordered life.

"That wind is so unsettling," my wife said. We remembered the wind in Wyoming that never seemed to die. We had no tranquilizer darts to blow into the heart of the storm. The wind was an emblem of everything we could not control, joining the images of breakdown, terrorist attack, and hoards roaming the frozen landscape in search of food that fuel millennial fever.

I sat in the dark for a moment when the lights went out. My first thoughts were of data I hadn't saved. The cursor on the screen vanished into thin air like everything around me. There was nothing, after all, at which to point. My hand slid from the dead mouse.

Last summer I wrote a column, "A Silent Retreat," when the lights went out in a storm. But that was summer. Neighbors gathered outside in the warm night, and the next day, we ran errands on foot. Life was time-rich without our usual obligations. This time it was November, and the only sign of neighbors in the blackness that stretched as far as we could see were flickering flashlight beams on drawn curtains.

This time it went on for several days. A hundred thousand people in our corner of the state were without heat or light. The winds continued the next day, and as fast as crews could upright a pole or raise a downed power line, another fell.

In the morning we realized that our cars were locked in the garage. My wife took a taxi to work. A pile of printed material was waiting for just such a break in my seamless wrap-around world. Stephen Hawking notes that a human being would have to travel at ninety miles an hour twenty-four hours a day to keep pace with what's being published, just to stay at the interface. But it wasn't easy to concentrate.

Instead, I became aware as the day progressed of how unplugged I felt. The computer was dead, with all my contacts and email. The television was dead. The car was inaccessible. The temperature was dropping steadily, and I moved like a cat toward the sunlight that slid across the sofa through the day. When an early dusk brought no sign of the restoration of power, we ate bread and cheese and fruit, then huddled under blankets, a dozen candles lighting the room. We located a radio with batteries and listened to love songs, gentled by candlelight flickering in the chilly dark.

Of course, this was not really a dry run for disaster. It turned into a lark. We knew they were working sixteen hour shifts. We figured out how to jimmy the window in the garage and crawl in and liberate our cars so we could have gone to a friend's house in a part of town that worked. But still, our sense of disorder was real. The degree to which we lived in a simulated world, plugged into interfaces feeding us with images, sounds, and illusions was revealed by contrast with the silence of the night.

The simple truth is, we drifted into an altered state. We were more than quiet. The night was more than dark, the candles more than adequate, because they enabled us to see just enough. The music on the old portable was beautiful and clear. The warmth of our bodies under an afghan was more than enough.

That deep quiet joy is accessible always, we have to believe ... but once the lights were back on and the house too warm, despite the fact that we lighted candles the next night, the mere possibility of turning on lights was a barrier between ourselves and the stillness we had touched.

Community is more than dependence, more than noticing that different skills keep society alive. Community is the simple truth we discover when we huddle in the darkness keeping ourselves warm by the fact of our closeness rather than emblems of connection. It is beyond electronic symbols, beyond printed images and text, beyond written words, beyond the capacity of speech to reach. Those are symbols, and symbols are a menu, while what we had tasted was a real meal. An affinity for the truth of another, the fact of pattern in a plausible chaos.

November 14 1998