Palo Alto is its own little world and doesn't offer much in terms of culture, unless shopping for gilded bathroom tiles is your idea of culture. The baffling thing is that this doesn't really matter. This place harbours major forces that shape our present, leaving a distinct mark: specialised sciences, technologies (bio-, nano-, chip), engineering (mechanical, computer, genetic), together with Nasa research centres, create a peculiar force field, one that is at once synthetic and organic. Here, humanity is constantly on the move to a new kind of living, one that is no longer defined by old natural boundaries. Here, at the junction of geographical margin and technological frontier, is where the future is taking shape — in a palpable, visceral sense: a force you can feel in the atmosphere.

While I was living in Palo Alto a few years ago, I would often wonder what generated this deep feeling of being in tune with time and space. Friends at Stanford suggested it had something to do with the reclusiveness of this particular part of California, combined with big business, grand landscapes, great food and good weather. Others said it was due to the fact that this was earthquake country. What other way of living would be appropriate here?

It was only then, however, that Henry David Thoreau's Walden made sense to me. In 1845, the author took up residence in a small house in a forest owned by his friend Emerson near Concord, Massachusetts: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life...and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived...I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live... as to put to rout all that was not life — to drive life into a corner. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it." 

If it is true that in 2010 we are uncertain about life, perhaps a sense of certainty can only be found away from the established patterns of civilisation and modern metropolises at the margins of wilderness. Driving along the foggy Pacific coast, I thought: it is here that one can feel at once removed from life and at the centre of its most intense concentration. Living like a Californian doesn't mean adopting the extravagant habits of a bankrupt state but taking a more organic attitude towards life that may serve as a matrix for our civilisation.

"There you go — a blinkered appraisal," I can hear my friend in New York sneer. "You didn't give us the dark side of the story." But I was writing from California, I will respond.  They do things differently there.