The road is a place itself, or a border between places, a long narrow country without citizens whose only inhabitants are transients and strangers, a great suspended interval of privacy and peace between departure and arrival. And the road is a net dropped over the vastness of the continent, tying together all its distances into one navigable labyrinth of asphalt.... Roads are the architecture of our restlessness, of those who wish neither to stay in their built places nor wander in the untouched ones, but to keep moving between them. A road promises something else to us, though the promise is better fulfilled by traveling than by arriving.... A road is itself a kind of sentence, or story. A real place, it's also a metaphor for time, for future becoming present and then past, for passage. (365-366) Savage Dreams (1994) |