Sunday, July 20, 2008

A Path

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.
Wendell Berry, "A Native Hill" from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Norman Wirzba, editor. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002.

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