it goes on and on and on and on

When I was young, I spent about a year living in a small town in the hills of California. I had planned to live in the sprawling city on the bay, from which a train ran daily to the suburb where I worked. But a few months after I began work, an older uncle living in the hills came down with a fever which turned with time into a slow, helpless forgetfulness. What could I do? A family must care for its own; for the time being, responsibility for his care fell to me.

So instead of riding the train, every day I drove sixty-three miles from the small town where I lived with him to the suburb where I worked. My uncle's aging automobile had a charm and elegance of its own, though it burned gasoline at an astonishing rate -- nearly a quarter of a tank per round trip.

I usually left work hours after sunset, the road stretched endlessly out ahead of me. At night, the white ramps and bridges are mute marvels, deserted and bewildering in size. I traveled past miles and miles of streetlights, their orange glow blotting out the stars. (Astrology is a lost art for good reason.) But the empty highway has a way of blanking my mind, and soon I was home. I felt a kind of sympathetic embarrassment for the sixty-three miles of desert between my office and my town in the hills -- to be surmounted so easily, first by a gang of overgrown monkeys and their bridges and roads, then by any old fool in an automobile!

It occurred to me much later that distance is only a kind of metaphor for something we knew once and have now forgotten. A symbol, maybe, for something like wonder, something like eternity. There is no word for it, of course -- the purpose of metaphor is to explain those things for which there are no exact words. But this is an age ruled by literal men, who know that a highway overpass is not an astonishing, blasphemous chain binding the earth away from the sky, but simply the most efficient way to cross from point A to point B with the minimum expenditure of time and treasure.