on mobility, degrees of aloneness

Roads uncover solitude and suggest other lives. They bring you up to City. They sweep all of the hutches along in an anonymous dance and destroy the Quarters. A road is good neither too early nor too late. If you get it right, consider yourself lucky.

We learned to love solitude. ... To be too alone in the hills was to offer one's spine to the zombie's dirty hands. Helping each other was the law, a helping hand to do what was possible, working together for the immediate needs: in the hills, solitude must fight isolation. Many of the first colonists failed in their adventure because they did not know that. Solitude is a relative of freedom. Isolation is snake food.... (131)

- Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov