I used to dream ( in my forties) of retiring to the pastoral Oregon or Washington of my childhood. Forget it. The air force generals and weapons engineers ( my brother-in-law is one of them) from Los Angeles who got rich on the weapons boom ( pun intended) of the seventies and the eighties have all the best enclaves already owned. Whidbey Island is covered in Vietnam officer corps retirees.
So, my point is that age is a central force in all this argument about ideal abodes and states of mind.
At sixty, I'm pleased that I live on a small stipend in Southern California in a dumb tract house. I've been told there is no such house anymore since all of them cost out at over half a million bucks these days.
The piece of paper or book under your fingers and eyes is as close to paradise as you'll ever get.
There is disorder everywhere else.
Proust argued that he could write a literary masterpiece by staying in his room. And did.
In contrast, fewer people ( proportionately) probably care about Captain Frederick Marryat's adventures today than when they first appeared.
My point is not to argue about literary genres, though.
Some dream of escaping to a Scottish isle; I used to dream of escaping to Berkeley in 1968, and did.
But it all becomes street sweeper dust, this dream of escape to an exciting city; and as Dave Barry points out, watching for the seven warning signs of colon cancer can become more of a focus for your existence than worrying about whether you can repel the pirate boarders heaving alongside your schooner.
Healthy, interesting lives issue from healthy, interesting imaginations. By "healthy" imaginations " I don't mean those that would necessarily be approved of by Mormon youth counselors, of course.
I mean closer to what Allen Ginsberg and William Blake and Terry Southern
http://www.terrysouthern.com/
and Tuli Kupferberg
http://www.furious.com/perfect/tuli.html
meant by the imagination.
And while I'm at it, take a look at the real wet dream of the US way of looking at "its" universe: Dr. Strangelove and the Long Rod Penetrator:
http://www.nypress.com/17/52/news&colum ... itchik.cfm
Zlatko