Air castles

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost;
That is where they should be.

Henry David Thoreau

No, I didn't run off with the circus yesterday. I spent my early blogging hour in front of the TV, mesmerized by the epic earthquake and tsunami. Life isn't always feathers and flowers.

We watched The Social Network last night, that movie about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. It's an interesting story, although it made me tired watching those Ivy League kids partying around the clock. I thought of Thoreau, who also went to Harvard in 1837. Surely another world then, although colleges have always been filled with ambitious dreamers and rebels. The legend goes that after finishing his courses, the frugal and prickly Thoreau refused to pay the $5 fee for a Harvard diploma. He didn't need it anyway, because the professions open to an educated person didn't interest him: law, medicine, business and the church. Zuckerberg and Bill Gates were misfits at Harvard, too. And as they say, the rest is history.

Thoreau is famous for the short Walden period of "living deliberately" and mulling over "civil disobedience." But he had a long and productive (if unconventional) life. His last dying words were: "Now comes good sailing."

The picture below is a replica of his Walden cabin. Zuckerberg's fridge is probably bigger.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau