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We were nomads once. We migrated, never remaining for long in a single location. The world lay open and undiscovered, borderless. We could walk in any direction, follow our will, explore new lands.
Now we are sedentary. We live our lives sitting down. Drive the car to the store. Fly if traveling longer distances. Call to have the pizza delivered to our door and purchase automatic lawn mowers, robots to do the work for us while we sit sunning and thinking about more pressing matters than mowing the lawn.
The journey has lost its original purpose. It is no longer an essential undertaking to sustain our lives; rather, it has become a form of amusement and recreation. We board an airplane in one corner of the world and disembark in another. We have the ability to put enormous distances behind us without expending any of our own energy or gaining any knowledge about the paths and landscapes that lie unfurled beneath the cloud cover several thousand feet below. A lot has changed and a lot has been lost when checking in at the airport is the most energy-intensive stage of a journey that relocates us from one side of the globe to the other.
Our ability to read a landscape used to be indispensable for survival. Now we no longer require any knowledge of navigation and orienteering to get where we want to go. The path is displayed on our smartphones, our GPS, and as we walk we stare down at a lit screen instead of up at the place where we are and the path we are on. Our sense of place has become an aptitude we would prefer to do without. The same is true for our sense of distance.
Paths were the first main thoroughfares, and the way in which they meander and wind through the landscape tells us something very fundamental about the people who created them. A path’s line is never accidental. It is not the shortest distance between two points; it is the simplest. It is a result of the intrinsic human inclination to choose the path of least resistance, because conserving energy used to be so critical for survival.
Messengers traveled by foot on paths or carriage roads. The time it took to walk the path was secondary to the energy it required. Upon arrival, the message may already have become outdated and possibly even untrue. “Everyone is doing fine,” the letter may have said, read by a European immigrant to America from relatives back home, though in the months that had passed since the letter was posted, many of those relatives, perhaps even the letter-writer, may have died of hunger, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, or in childbirth.
The premise for all travel was that it took time. The war might well be over by the time the messenger arrived to say it had just broken out.
The history of paths is also the history of a world on the verge of disappearing. First, paths transformed into roads, feet became wagons and horse carriages, dirt was replaced with asphalt and concrete. More recently, wagons and horse carriages have been switched out for cars and heavy transport vehicles, roads have been widened, swamps drained, mountains blown up, and plains leveled with a layer of crushed gravel. The duration of a journey used to be determined by the path. Today it is possible to adapt and reconfigure the landscape. Mountains can be blasted, wetlands drained, rivers diverted into pipes. We have all but eliminated the barriers of physical space in travel. Time, however, has now become the most important factor.
