Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

Roads are the most successful human illusion: an artifact so ubiquitous we stop seeing it as artifice. Le Gallienne, a poet with a late-19th-century sensitivity to the border between the made world and the given one, zeroes in on a sly psychological trick. The road is "the work of man's hands" and then, with a corrective nudge, "more properly... his travelling feet". That pivot matters. He demotes the heroic builder and elevates repetition, habit, and desire-line logic: infrastructure begins as longing made physical, then hardens into permanence.

The subtext is about naturalization - not in the romantic sense, but in the cultural one. Time and use launder intention. What started as an economic corridor, a military route, a path to work, becomes "a feature of the landscape" in the mind's eye. Le Gallienne is catching us in the act of forgetting. We grant roads the innocence we reserve for "rocks and trees", and with that innocence comes amnesia about whose movement gets prioritized, whose land gets cut, whose neighborhood gets bisected. A road looks neutral once it looks inevitable.

Contextually, he’s writing from a period when modern mobility is accelerating - railways, improved highways, the early motor age - and the landscape is being reorganized around circulation. His sentence works because it feels gentle while it’s actually accusatory: the most consequential human interventions are the ones that pass as scenery.