We know of...roads that seem to lead somewhere but end in the unnavigable. These paths are paradoxes, since their existence means that someone was already there, yet their abrupt endings make us wonder where their first travellers have gone. In German such a path is called Holzweg, which means both timber track and, figuratively, wrong track, as in being utterly at fault...To pursue the Holzweg is to enter the new, although the new with obscure origins in the past.

Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the subject of landscape, 1990