country roads.

Image: Country Roads essay by Thomas Moore.

Image: country lane.

Thomas Moore.

NOT FAR FROM where I used to live in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, at the start of a small road is a sign saying that it had won an award for being the most beautiful country road. The road as an art object. When I think of certain roads from my childhood, I realise that country roads can indeed be beautiful. You might even imagine taking a drive on a Sunday afternoon for no other purpose than to be refreshed. In fact, one of the last memories I have of my mother, is of taking a ride on a long flat road in central Michigan, watching for deer and getting an ice cream. It's a precious memory, and I love to think of her taking so much pleasure in having her family with her while contemplating the beauty she could see from the narrow, reed-lined, blacktop road.

Like everything else, beautiful roads are threatened. People seem always to want them wider and straighter. But with such improvements comes further development, and the country is taken out of the road. Quickly the roads become ugly and purely functional, and they detract from the quality of life. I can't imagine a good memory of sitting next to my dear mother in a car cruising down a six-lane highway lined with factories and refineries.

Often we take the beauty out of roads to save time. But for what? Why the speed? Why focus on getting somewhere rather than enjoying the ride? The only answer I can come up with is that speed is an emotional complex related to the philosophy of modernism. Fast food is an obvious instance of the syndrome, and so are roads built for speed.

I'm not suggesting that all roads be country roads, but that driving can be a pleasure as well as a necessity. In transportation, beauty is as important as function. Speed could be part of the equation - I appreciate the fast train from Boston to New York - but so can the beautiful, and sometimes beauty may take primacy over function. It may be a facet of my romantic status as a visitor, but my warmest memories of England are of country roads that lacked considerably in speed and function. And I will never forget a trip to Iona on the slow, single-lane roads of Scotland.

I am from Detroit, where cars are made. My grandfather worked for Dodge Trucks most of his life, and my brother still works in the automobile steel industry. I appreciate a good automobile and enjoy a beautiful ride in the country. At the same time, I see the horrors the automobile has brought; how beautiful land has been carved up for too many roads; how road rage has eaten away at civility; how our cities are sacrificed to tunnels, overpasses, and highways.

I don't want to un-invent the wheel, but I do think we could build our roads and care for them in a way that would enhance human life rather than uglify it. Roads could be built for beauty, with people like my mother in mind, who can enjoy a road as a way of healing their spirit. The value of speed is usually an unconscious assumption that dominates our concern in making roads. We could consider nature, beauty, families, settlements, and peaceful living as well.

I suggest more awards for beautiful roads, humane input in the design of automobiles and their fuel, art and photography educating us in the potential beauty of transportation, an effort to slow down the pace of life, and more inexpensive inventions that get us from place to place slowly and enjoyably. There is something inherent in the modern car that is neurotic and demonic. A person driving a car is often more aggressive and self-centred than that same person sitting at dinner. The combination of isolation, power, and phallicism of the car turns drivers into maniacs. It doesn't have to be so.

I often turn to Greek mythology at a point like this to find inspiration. I'm reminded of the great technologist Hephaistos, who is related to all kinds of finger- and digit-like beings, little phalluses, who are busy making things from metal. In traditional tales he was married to Aphrodite, goddess of the sexual and the beautiful, and was a close friend of Charis, who was in charge of the gracefulness of life. We need this marriage and this friendship restored. Hephaistos without his women becomes a runaway phallic finger who gets into plenty of mischief. He is hypermasculinised and too devoted to work.

Atalanta is another figure of myth who is driven: she runs too fast. In a crucial race Aphrodite slows her down, forcing her to get married. That's what we need in our town planners and road and car builders: a touch of Aphrodite to help slow us down and appreciate the beauty around us. We need to be married to our world and not frenzied in our isolation. The soul is fed by beauty and not by speed.

I will continue to enjoy the country roads near where I live and where I visit. When possible, I will choose the slow road over the highway. I will continue to drive a car, but I will do it as much as possible for pleasure and beauty rather than for mere function and convenience. It will be part of my generally slow life.

Freud talked about a dream as being the royal road to the unconscious. I think we could reverse that notion and find dreams in the roads we drive. In the New Testament Jesus says, "I am the road (hodos), the truth, and the life." If we could think theologically for a moment about transportation, we might find in a small road the Buddha's path, the way of the Tao, and Jesus's route to the kingdom.

A car and a road convey not only bodies, but souls as well. Imagine a car made to satisfy the soul and a road designed to give the soul its pleasures. Imagine a civic department of soul transport and a road crew assigned to keeping the roadway slow and beautiful. Imagine going in a car not to get anywhere, but to be.

Thomas Moore is a former Catholic monk and author of Care of the Soul.

Printed with the kind permission of Thomas Moore.