Crooked Roads

Scattered throughout “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” these proverbs work like splinters—small irritants meant to unsettle comfortable assumptions. What arrests me now is that line about roads: “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”

We live in an age devoted to optimization, to making every path straighter and faster. Our tools promise efficiency, the elimination of unnecessary wandering. But Blake places genius elsewhere—on unimproved paths, the ones no algorithm would recommend.

This isn’t an argument against tools or efficiency. Birds ride thermals they didn’t create. It’s a reminder that creative work has always required a willingness to look foolish, to persist in what appears to be excess, to trust what’s unoptimized in ourselves. “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” The emphasis falls on persist—not the single foolish act but the stubborn continuation, the faith that this crooked way might lead somewhere.

And then that image: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” Blake leaves us not with an answer but an inquiry. The question isn’t whether to fly, or how high, but whose wings we’re using. What would it mean to persist in your own particular folly long enough to find the wisdom waiting there? What crooked road is already beneath your feet, waiting not for improvement but for your trust?