Notes from the Road
Another long auto trip, with its attendant impressions, reinforces my feeling that our successors will see the ruins of the interstate highway system as the supreme and defining monument of our culture. The interstate system externalizes a creative act Promethean in dynamism and scope— as if a pre-Olympian sculptor had taken the nation’s continental land mass as his medium. To comprehend its form you must look at a map of the system, such as is included in a standard road atlas. You see at once that the system was conceived in terms of the nation as a whole, conceived as a network of ligatures, or arteries, that would link the nation into a whole. Mountains and plains, valleys and deserts, cities and farms and wide open spaces, all are framed and encompassed.
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