Read Napoleon's Roads for Free Online Page B

desert’s edge think of A. as an oasis from the heat and sand, a place at the end of a trade route, controlled by transactions that neither the harbour nor the miners consider. A. is all of these things, a different city for everyone who reaches it, a different memory for everyone who leaves.
    In a system reflecting and perhaps integral to all of these things, A. is governed, unobtrusively, sometimes almost tacitly, by an assembly of poets and philosophers – which is to say that it is hardly governed at all, in the usual way of arrangements for garbage collection, approval of roads, provision for municipal taxes (these things are left, as perhaps they should be, to administrators), but governed nonetheless, impalpably yet almost utterly. The assembly meets annually, for anything from a few days to two weeks or more, in a large hall built for the purpose almost eleven centuries ago, a building with a great cupola and high, unglazed openings so arranged as to let the dusty light fall naturally on the floor beneath it into a circle the size of which has always determined the size of the assembly. It might hold fifty or sixty quite comfortably – somewhat more if the occasion demands – but in fact there are rarely more than a dozen. I call them poets and philosophers, although these terms, loose enough in themselves, only approximate the nature and function of the legislation produced here, and might belie the very real sense in which these people are self-selected. It is not unusual to find amongst the assembly a banker, say, or a midwife, a nurse, a priest, a housewife, a cooper or a digger of drains, each of whom has found themselves called by what they themselves have construed, or perhaps it is simply realised , to be the poet or philosopher within.
    In the shadowed places far below the cupola, between the columns about the lighted circle, people gather to listen to the proceedings, almost always in silence but for an occasional murmur of approval, puzzlement or dismay. Sometimes these people are many – again it depends upon the issue – and sometimes only a few, but it is often from these shadows that a new member of the assembly comes, having attended perhaps for a number of years, sitting or standing outside the circle, and learnt, and thought, and found at last the confidence or need to step out. At which time, it should be said, they are never questioned, for this is the manner in which so many of those already there have also arrived. There is no romance in the work, no kudos , no power that one can readily utilise or see, no statesmanlike name to be made since names are so rarely carried beyond the confines of the hall. It is not for these reasons that people step forward.
    Rather, it is that their minds have been caught up in an ancient and intricate discussion, the rules and assumptions of which, contained always within the collective consciousness of the assembly, have passed down from generation to generation for over a thousand years. If the assembly is always open to the newcomer – and there are, as I have already intimated, those who enter the circle for only one meeting, or who come and go almost without notice – it is always guided by its elders whose minds, over the years, have become vast repositories of the discussions that have passed.
    The first and strongest of these rules, determining the fate and course of any new subject or idea, is that no such thing may be ventured upon without preface or precedent within the discussions of the assembly itself. All things must connect. Every new idea must be demonstrated to have its seed or origin in a previous idea; every new subject must begin in a subject somewhere before it; any new thought must be taken to the venerable river of thought that has run down, in this manner, through the ages. Thus the discourse itself can be seen to determine its own paths, accepting or rejecting what is brought to it by force of what it has