American roads impose on the landscape without human trace, and so slip from memory.

Evidence

The shortcoming of the American landscape is not so much, as romantic illusion would have it, the absence of historical memories, as that it bears no traces of the human hand. This applies not only to the lack of arable land, the uncultivated woods often no higher than scrub, but above all to the roads. These are always inserted directly in the landscape, and the more impressively smooth and broad they are, the more unrelated and violent their gleaming track appears against its wild, overgrown surroundings. They are expressionless. Just as they know no marks of foot or wheel, no soft paths along their edges as a transition to the vegetation, no trails leading off into the valley, so they are without the mild, soothing, un-angular quality of things that have felt the touch of hands or their immediate implements. It is as if no-one had ever passed their hand over the landscape’s hair. It is uncomforted and comfortless. And it is perceived in a corresponding way. For what the hurrying eye has seen merely from the car it cannot retain, and the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces behind than it bears upon itself. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 45

Categorization

• XREF: Adorno’s diagnosis of the American road as expressionless and unmindful connects to a critique of infrastructural modernism — see also J.B. Jackson’s writings on the American road and, in fiction, the freeway as traumatic grid in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. — connects to: Roads and campgrounds dilute solitude rather than develop recreation — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 603