When you fly at night over the west, or the midwest, you float in an ocean of stars, and the lights on the ground are delicate traceries that link tiny clusters of orange and white splashes, here and there a highway stretches out straight and long between the nodes of the evidence of our hunting and our gathering, the places where we find comfort together and work to pay our taxes and escape to the shopping malls for the unifying balm of retail therapy, the lights mushed together with all the order of a gaudy and artless diamond brooch, designed by a system that values counting and weighing above beauty and wonder.

But when you fly above the east coast at night, the impression is quite different. The streams and flows of roads are twisted and tangled together, linguinilike; and the streetlights in each subdivision cluster seem to -- almost, but not quite -- spell out hieroglyphics that call out to space "We're here. Understand us if you can." This is because when the human eye sees a series of dots it is incapable of perceiving them as dots only, but seeks a meaningful pattern, we sort and combine and permutate the points of streetlights into constellations, flickering in baroque pizzicatos.

The megalopolis that we are joining up - connecting the urban corridor from Boston to Miami - is impossible to deny, pretending won't make it go away. There may be many many resorts and holiday escapes nestled here and there within it, but it is now possible to walk the full length of the coast at night, and never step into darkness, real darkness. Or find a place of silence under the stars.

And for all the efforts of all our best designers to delude us that we are living in the park-like setting of the elder days, when your eyes look down through the tiny oval window of a jet plane it becomes is clear is that we are living on the surface of a hive, on the face of the borg, fueled by burning oil and gasoline and the burning filaments in the mercury-vapor and metal-halide lamps, electricity throbbing along the highway corridors, cars and trucks endlessly swishing past one another on errands in opposite directions -- I was on the street in a city yesterday and an ambulance screamed past me from behind and a moment later another passed going in the opposite direction, polar emergencies; each in need of machinery.

Looking down on the distant twinkling lights of the cars and trucks, knowing the drivers inside the vehicles were looking down on the twinkling lights of their dashboards.. and perhaps, here or there, one of them looking up at the twinkling lights of the jet plane above, all of us carrying the secrets of hearts, the burdens and joys of the days, our small defeats and victories and heartbreaks and happiness, coming from or going to a loved one, a family, to see the new baby or bury the great uncle; it occurred to me that maybe this is the story of the hieroglyphs we write on our hills, the meaning of our great nazca lines, route 95, route I-80, as we form our Courasant, slicing our time thinner and thinner and each of us pulling our horizons closer and closer to ourselves, building and inhabiting machines that extend our reach and also limit what it is we are able to grasp.

The clouds intervened in my mechanical reverie, graced by the bright moon. For a while below us the tendrils of clouds lay in the low places, like night-smoke, nestling and comforting the sharper and pointed patterns of the too-dense pinprick lights. I was distracted for a moment, and then looked back to see a wonder. The clouds had thickened, bunched together, but left empty spaces where islands of the urbanizing landscape showed through, looking as though they were islands floating in the mist like great kelp forests in the Sargasso. The clouds flowed away into the distance and merged with the stars that arched high above and behind the moon, making a world without gravity, the islands bristling with lights floating like parallel galaxies in a soft interstellar mist.

Below, from time to time I saw a strange darting silver-white light. It seemed to flash and move, like the foam of a breaker on a distant sandbar, like the sudden flash of a silver fish darting to safety, like the pivoting beacon of a solitary lighthouse combing the sea and relentlessly moving on. Try as I might I couldn't determine the source of these flashes as I looked down on them. They weren't localized, they seemed to travel with the plane, so it wasn't a factory exploding or a sudden sinkhole draining an inky lake. Finally, I looked up at the oval moon and slowly understood. She was reflecting her light, bouncing it off the waterways back up at the plane, back up at my window, playing hide and seek with the glittering waters, flashing. As she has for millenia of millenia.