You have walked down the street a thousand times. You walk the road – a threadbare commonplace, and yet true. And how many kinds of road there are! Stony and smooth, falling and rising, paved and dusty, straight and winding, snowy and wet, a climb cut into the mountainside or an arrow-straight track across the plain, a pilgrims' way or a quiet street, a footpath or a thoroughfare, a narrow alley or a bright promenade… Not to mention that at times it fades into nothing, or is an outright dead end.
Of all the many kinds of paving, perhaps the dearest to me is the small cobblestone. Diligent hands set a million stone cubes side by side – what patience, perseverance and foresight! To think that cubes a few fingers wide will one day become a road, one that sets out from somewhere and leads somewhere, not just anywhere, but somewhere. The cobbled road is a triumph of man's faith, and yet everything begins in the quarry, from where no one can yet see which way the road will lead.
But once the road is trodden out, sooner or later it will have followers too, who use it, walk it, and reach their goal along it. Was it perhaps humanity's first step that marked out the road itself, the path for all ages that must be walked? Did everything begin with the first step? And would the first step have marked out every road on the face of the earth, be it a forest trail or a main road? And can all of us only step into someone's footprints, is there no untrodden road for which we might leave the trodden ones? Are we all, of necessity, wayfarers and trackers? Step after step, right, left, right again, and on we go… Sometimes you crawl and clamber painfully on all fours, at other times the road lies smooth beneath your soles and everything goes of its own accord, and now and then you even walk a span above it, though that is no credit to the road…
Have you ever wondered what holds the stones together? What is the magic power that arranges the small stones, which for all their corners would roll off every which way, and keeps them in place? You might think it is the kerb. It is the kerb that makes the road, and where there is no kerb, there is no road either. You yourself sense that the argument is weak and flawed. Just as the riverbank does not create the river, only its bed, for the river is water, nothing but water, so the kerbstone does not make the road either, for the road simply is, it is purely road.
The small stones are held together by still smaller components: grit, sand and even the invisible ones, sweat and will. A paving stone by itself rolls away, sand by itself trickles apart. Together the two hold firm. The bedding is what matters. You fill the gaps between the large stones with smaller ones, you bed both the small and the large in sand, and when you have finished, you strew sand over it all and with patient strokes work the fine-grained sand into the gaps between the stones. Water carries into place the grains of sand the broom could not manage. Large, smaller, smaller still…
On such a road the wheel rolls noisily, but it grips well. He who goes afoot travels gratefully, though his soles feel the unevenness. This road is not smooth, but that is precisely what makes it significant. From the edges of a seldom-used cobbled road the vegetation sets out to conquer: tendrils and branches bend over the road, grass settles in the cracks between the stones, and where stones have been heaved out, weeds and rank growth take their place in the broken order, the great survivors of the harshest conditions.
Lift two such heaved-out cobblestones from the edge of the road and put them in a glass jar. The jar is full, filled by the two cobblestones. Add smaller stones beside them – now it is really full, you have filled the gaps! Take dry sand and sprinkle it gently into the jar – several handfuls have gone in, and if you shake the jar, the grains of sand fill the gaps between the stones and pebbles completely – this time the jar is truly full! But take water, and you can still pour that in. The sand soaks up the water, bedding the smaller pebbles in its dampness, and together they embrace the two stones… Small, a little larger, large…