The Road Dug Seven Times
Citation
For sustained devotion to the act of digging, undeterred by the absence of any agreed purpose, and for proving that a road is never truly finished while a department still has a shovel.
The Account
The Road Dug Seven Times began, as all great works do, with a small and reasonable trench. A cable was to be laid. The trench was opened, the cable laid, the trench filled, and the surface restored to a smoothness that lasted, by the institution’s records, eleven days.
On the twelfth day a second authority arrived, unaware of the first, and reopened the same ground to lay a pipe. The pipe was laid. The trench was filled. A third authority followed, then a fourth, each restoring the road to a brief and innocent wholeness before the next began.
By the seventh excavation, the road had achieved a kind of geological complexity rarely seen above ground — a cross-section of intentions, each layer a different department’s certainty that the work was, at last, complete.
The institution inducted the road not in spite of this history but because of it. Few works so perfectly express the city’s central truth: that completion is not an ending here, merely an interval before the next beginning. The barricades remain, lovingly maintained, and the eighth excavation is widely anticipated.