There's a wonderful story, which is probably apocryphal, which I love. When Samuel Morse sent the first wireless message -- from Boston up to Maine, something like that -- Thoreau was out at Walden Pond. Some friend of his came running out with the news about this great invention, this wireless message they had sent. And Thoreau just looked at him and said, 'But what did it say?' And that's always stuck in my mind. It's always been so important to me: What am I saying? Why am I saying it? -- Walter Bernstein, On Writing #17
Cute story. But what occurs to me is not that Thoreau was deep, but that he utterly failed to grasp the importance of what he'd heard. The medium was the message.
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