The Shortest Way Home Michael Durack

The Shortest Way Home

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. (James Joyce “Ulysses”)

Before we discovered Euclidian geometry, before we had truck with isosceles triangles or the square of the hypotenuse, experience taught us that one rough path through fields to school could race two smoothly tarmacked roads.

On the rugby pitch we practised the art of corner-flagging, the diagonal that led directly to where the action would be. And sometimes an opponent could best be beaten by going through him for a short-cut, a manouevre New Zealanders dubbed the Maori sidestep.

As grown-ups we employed commercial short-cuts, sharp practice, chicanery; and ethical short-cuts, dissimulation, equivocation, economies with the truth, while we diverged from the puritanical straight and narrow to Shakespeare’s primrose path of dalliance.

Now it is time to slow down, to ignore rat runs and beelines, to heed Bloom’s warning, avoid running into ourselves. Time to follow the ring road’s gentle arc, to appreciate that the longest way round may well be the shortest way home.

Michael Durack

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