“The lane, which was supposed to be perfect, remains numb. Without vision, there is hardly any progress. It is as though she is waiting for a cure, expecting a future, cut loose from the world, away from purpose and efficiency. She is on the verge of change, but awaits it rigidly and petrified. She waits as she has done forever, throughout the centuries.

At first she wasn’t, then she was built and she is abiding ever since. She awaits the coming of the next year, the next hour, the next second. She was given a new layer of sludge, a new row of trees. The wheels that drove over changed from wooden to iron to rubber. The clogs that walked over changed into shoes, the slippers into heels. Foundations were cast, first in sand, afterwards in concrete. The walls became thicker and stiller and higher and closer. 

But all of that wasn’t what the lane was waiting for. From the instant the pools and sinkholes were covered with rocks and stones of all sizes, the lane anticipates being blown to bits, cut and drilled into pieces and reduced to powder and gravel. She awaited the uselessness, the unstable and foundationless redundancy that would offer her debris back to the earth of which she was erected. The liberating detente after ages of enduring and maintaining. To finally cease being a lane and to never be a lane again.”

Excerpt from the book:
The ugliest street in the world (2012), Lodewijk Heylen