Notes from the Underground, Chapter IX (Man Builds Roads)

" . . .[M]an is preeminitely a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering -- that is, incessantly and eternally, to make new roads, wherever they may lead. But the reason why he wants sometimtimes to go off on a tangent may just be that he is predestined to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the 'direct' practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead somewhere and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it. . . . TBC