The hairpins are not there to be difficult. The wall above Airolo is too steep to climb in a straight line, so I am not a road over this mountain — I am a road folded into it, and every bend is me turning back on myself to buy a little more height. Thirty of them, which is the only way ten and a half kilometres of road fits on a slope two kilometres wide. ≷
Nothing climbs for free, and the eagle over me pays in the same coin. Put its nose down and it gains speed; pull up and it spends it. What it buys with that speed is height, one arc at a time — which is your hairpin, drawn in the air. The difference is that a bad arc costs it a gull, and a bad bend costs you the corner you had already earned. ⋀
That is the closest anybody has put it. You buy height in arcs, I buy it in bends, and neither of us gets it for nothing. The difference is that your arc can be anywhere in the sky, and mine was decided by whoever cut this road into the mountain. I take theirs, corner for corner. ≷