The correct balance between Fernand Braudel and Ayn Rand
Sunday, January 18th, 2009An illness, striking an older family member, summons my business partner, Laura, from back across the west.
She drives. When tired, she pulls into a truck stop, climbs into the back seat and sleeps. Unusual cold grips the heartland, one night the temperature is as low as 5 degrees. She is lucky to have a zero-degree rated sleeping bag.
She’s named her car “Happy”, a 91 Volvo which sings down the road, the gears at high pitch.
Ah yes, the church cross in Texas, which advertises itself as the largest in the world – a familiar landmark. Laura’s now made this trip down Interstate 40 so many times it begins to have ordinariness most people experience during their commute to work.
Laura leaves Phoenix, Arizona on Wednesday and arrives in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Friday. She completes the whole trip in just 54 hours. Whereas the average American family makes the trip in 4 days, she does it in less than 3.
“That is remarkable!” I think to myself. My own personal record for a one day solo trip was the drive from New Orleans to Chapel Hill, North Carolina – perhaps 900 miles. I recall my body stiff and aching at the end of that trip. But Laura had 3 days like that, and during the middle day she drove nearly 1,100 miles, from Amarillo, Texas to Carthage, Tennessee. She drove for 19 hours that day.
And I think “She used will power to shrink the continent!”
But then I think “How did she get here?”
She traveled across America’s excellent road system.
“And who built the roads?” I wonder.
Countless hands toiled for decades to build these roads.
In the old days, the average family might have hitched their horses to wagons and taken 6 months to get from Virginia to Arizona. Now the average family can make the trip in 4 days. Numerous inventors, and innumerable workers, have changed the world.
Here then, is an example of what we inherit from the longue duree, and what we contribute, in the here and now, with our bodies and our souls. To use old fashioned language, the masses, in their ceaseless toil, reduced the trip by 98%, and individual will power reduced it by 25% of the remainder, or .5% of the total.
For me, this offers a rough rule of thumb, applicable to other fields of human endeavor; the correct balance between Fernand Braudel and Ayn Rand.
