My daughters and I just watched a movie whose soundtrack featured the Tom Cochrane song “Life is a Highway”. What an odious, and sadly telling, metaphor.
The complete lyrics aren’t of interest to me, just that metaphor. What does it mean that life is (or should be) a highway? What are the salient characteristics of highways?
Highways are designed for high-speed travel. They themselves are not rife with destinations — attractions only slow people down — but are merely the means to get from one place to another. So, if we say that “life is a highway”, we seem to be saying that life is (or should be) non-stop travel from one place to another. We’re saying that life is constant escape from our current situation. It is all novelty, lacking the intimacy that comes only with stability, regularity, and grappling with the familiar.
I think the highway’s main attraction — to those that romanticize it — is getting somewhere else. It does not hold the same appeal to those who are happy where they are. Romance with the highway is romance with with escape — which arises only with discontent, and which arises more frequently when people have no places worth staying in. Our national love affair with motoring bespeaks the general worthlessness of our communities as places of durable happiness.
The street, on the other hand, is not the highway. A good street is made for people, not for cars. It is full of destinations. It encourages dawdling and loitering. It is full of human activity and things of human interest. It is not a place to escape, but a place to build relationships and community.
Isn’t that what people should have a love affair with instead?
Have you been in touch with the people who run the Ester Republic? Deirdre has been writing about the physical community a lot lately.
Well, I’ve known Deirdre since 2002 or 2003, and we certainly rub elbows from time to time. But I haven’t talked with her (nor read the Ester Republic) lately.
I think “physical community” is pretty close to redundant. Of course, words are slippery animals, but I think it’s an abuse of the word “community” to mean “a population”, “a demographic”, or “a common-interest group on the Internet”. Real community means shared experience and shared fate — which almost necessitate shared space.
Yup. I’d agree. Community incorporates the idea of a physical location. See my post here on just this subject.
I think you misunderstood the metaphor. “Life is a highway” means that you are supposed to be always “moving forward”, i.e., learning more and maturing more. In Cochrane’s context, it is referring primarily to this process in a marital relationship.