When straight is a bit narrow
By Harry Eyres
Published: January 2 2010 01:24 | Last updated: January 2 2010 01:24
I remember learning about Roman roads. To be more precise, I can remember waking up at 6am on a freezing winter morning at boarding school and decamping from my quite warm and cosy bed to the shower and lavatory facilities, where the lights were kept on all night, so that I could mug up for a test on the details of construction of those undoubtedly impressive feats of engineering.
I felt no great love for the Roman surveyors and soldiers who had maintained such uniform and high standards of construction (I remember that our pedantic textbook was particularly hot on the drainage arrangements). This means that many of their roads are still in use or can be seen from the air, striding across expanses of what was once their empire in dead-straight lines.
The rather unimaginative teaching of Roman roads concentrated on the physical reality at the expense of reflection on what they represented: for example, the dominance of the military over the civil. Even more significantly, our teacher never invited us to reflect on what Roman roads were not, or what they might have replaced. Roman roads were progress, state-of-the-art means of getting about, comparable to the motorways that were being constructed in Britain around that time (the 1970s). We were meant to admire them without reservation – in particular, I think we were meant to admire their straightness.
The straight Roman roads (of course, they are not always straight, but long stretches of them are) were obviously designed as the fastest way of getting from one big centre to another. Everything in between was sidelined. You can see that there are advantages and disadvantages to this. Human settlements grow up around natural features of the landscape: river valleys and crossings, or hills that can be defended. Nature does not work in straight lines; rivers meander; to get up hills you need to double back, as John Donne reminded us when he wrote of the Hill of Truth that “he that will /Reach her about must and about must go”.
The directness with which the Romans achieved their objectives can still astonish us: even our motorways are not as straight and pay more heed to natural contours than some of their roads. And we should remember that those objectives were primarily military; hence the suffixes -cester, -chester or -caster, from the Latin word castra (military camp), in so many town names in Britain.
Obviously, the ancient Britons, Druids and other shaggy-haired characters who roamed the land before the arrival of the Romans also found their way around but in a very different way. In fact it seems that after the departure of the Romans, their roads fell out of use (no one knew how to maintain them) and the old ones were resuscitated.
Now I’m not going to suggest we abandon all of our well-engineered roads – though I would urge not building any more unnecessary ones based on outdated traffic projections – so much as suggesting a metaphorical consideration of this whole question of roads and paths. Our obsession with building fast, straightish roads that cut through landscapes and ignore humble settlements may have infected our whole way of thinking.
This at least was the view of Martin Heidegger when he gave the title Holzwege – literally Woodpaths – to his first postwar collection of essays. As he wrote in the foreword: “In the wood are paths that wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impenetrable thicket.” To be on a woodpath is a conversational German expression that means to be on the wrong track, a way that goes nowhere. But Heidegger’s point is that nowhere might turn out to be somewhere. “Woodcutters and foresters,” after all, “are familiar with these paths” and none is quite identical to another. Woodpaths don’t lead you definitively out of the woods but, then, by learning woodways and woodcraft, you might come to see the wood as somewhere full of possibility.
In my years as a university teacher I found that students increasingly wanted Roman roads or motorways rather than woodpaths. They wanted what were called “clear goals and objectives”, narrower than my old-fashioned idea of nurturing a more humane person; or rather, they wished to be presented with the shortest, quickest way of acquiring the grades they needed ... to get other grades. They seemed to want to be given the answers, rather than the means to explore and generate questions.
What works with military campaigns does not necessarily work in the field of liberal education. If your objective is to take Baghdad, you do not want to get bogged down in street-fighting in the suburbs. It’s a little different if your aim is to explore King Lear. But come to think of it, the strictly A-to-B approach does not really work with military campaigns either. When President George W Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 a large banner behind him read, “Mission Accomplished”.
It spoke rather too soon. Not enough attention had been paid to the hinterland, the network of winding paths that makes up a country, a mind, a world.
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
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