The car and the man.

The automobile--the Toyota, the Cadillac, the Buick, the Subaru, the Ford, the Jaguar, the Plymouth, the Bentley--is essentially a dream. No, it's better than that. It is a dream come true. For men.

For all of his existence, from the stone age until the last century, man was weak, slow, vulnerable to wind and weather. Man could basically move at the same speed in the early nineteenth century as he could in the fiftieth century B.C., when he fought off saber-toothed tigers. His worldview was shaped by his slowness--walking, at best riding a horse--dwarfed by the immeasurable distances of planet Earth. Man was puny and was constantly reminded of it by his pitiful slowness at getting from place to place, and his weary body. Above him in the ancient world were the gods, who flitted with lightning speed. Man was a mortal, doomed to crawl through life at a snail's pace.

Man could do some things to make himself stronger. He could put on armor, which protected him to some extent from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But the armor also hindered him, constricted him, slowed him down. Man could ride a horse, but the horse also tired, also was mortal, also needed food and water and rest.

This was galling to man, because men are the physical sex, the ones who need to show dominance and strength. Men got where they were through force and power and endurance, as compared with women, who succeeded through beauty and tenderness and understanding (and poison, if need be). But the limitations of even the strongest man were pitiful, especially in comparison with the legends of the endless strength and speed and durability of the gods. All about man were the signs of his weakness, in his own flesh and bone and muscle.

Then came the automobile, the modern, mighty, potent vehicle of the twentieth century. Suddenly man was infinitely powerful. More than that, man was no longer just man. Man became a Greek god. Man could be the man he'd wanted to be since the dawn of mankind. Man could zoom from place to place with dazzling speed. Man could be in New York in the morning and in Washington, D.C. at noon. Man could travel at speeds of which he had only dreamed, at any time and place of his choosing, in privacy, across vast plains and valleys.

Man was no longer hamstrung by distance or heat or fatigue. The car was the suit of magic armor that man could put on to make himself the immortal warrior he had always dreamed of being. Suddenly, in just a few generations, the man who had left his cottage to plod miserably along a muddy road, could suit up in his car, strap on his deity's wings and fly down the freeway carrying hundreds of pounds of freight with him effortlessly. Man could do anything he wanted in terms of travel in climate-controlled comfort with sounds on the stereo that drowned out any thoughts of his mortality, all for pennies per mile. And he felt like a king, no, mightier than any king or conqueror--for what could Napoleon or Caesar have conjured up that was even remotely comparable to the car?

If you want to see this evolution of mankind happening in microcosm, see man rise from the primordial ooze to the summit of earthly and heavenly power in just a few days, consider the young man and his first car. I saw this in June when our son came home from boarding school, armed with his learner's permit and a fairly good report card, to claim the car he had been promised for such achievements.