The important thing to me about a road, as about life--and literature, is not that it goes anywhere, but that it is livable while it goes.

For if I were to arrive--and who knows that I ever shall arrive ?--I think I should be no happier than I am here.
Thus I have commonly avoided the Great White Road--the broad, smooth turnpike--rock-bottomed and rolled by a State--without so much as a loitering curve to whet one's curiosity, nor a thank-you-ma'am to laugh over, nor a sinful hill to test your endurance--not so much as a dreamy valley! It pursues its hard, unshaded, practical way directly from some particular place to some other particular place and from time to time a motor-car shoots in at one end of it and out at the other, leaving its dust to settle upon quiet travellers like me.
Thus to-day when I came to the turnpike I was at first for making straight across it and taking to the hills beyond, but at that very moment a motor-car whirled past me as I stood there and a girl with a merry face waved her hand at me.

I lifted my hat in return--and as I watched them out of sight I felt a curious new sense of warmth and friendliness there in the Great Road.
"These are just people, too," I said aloud--"and maybe they really like it!" And with that I began laughing at myself, and at the whole, big, amazing, interesting world.

Here was I pitying them for their benighted state, and there were they, no doubt, pitying me for mine! And with that pleasant and satisfactory thought in my mind and a song in my throat I swung into the Great Road.
"It doesn't matter in the least," said I to myself, "whether a man takes hold of life by the great road or the little ones so long as he takes hold." And oh, it was a wonderful day! A day with movement in it; a day that flowed! In every field the farmers were at work, the cattle fed widely in the meadows, and the Great Road itself was alive with a hundred varied sorts of activity.

Light winds stirred the tree-tops and rippled in the new grass; and from the thickets I heard the blackbirds crying.
Everything animate and inanimate, that morning, seemed to have its own clear voice and to cry out at me for my interest, or curiosity, or sympathy.