Lines, by Tim Ingold

"As the certainties of modernity give way to doubt and confusion, lines that once went straight to the point have become fragmented, and the task of life is once more to find a way through the cracks." 4

"Every coupling of concept and sound-image is a word." 8

"Medieval thinkers did imagine that the work of memory inscribes the surface of the mind much as the writer inscribes the surface of the paper with his pen and the traveller inscribes the surface of the earth with his feet." 16

"The end of writing, I believe, was heralded by a radical change in the perception of the surface, from something akin to a landscape that one moves through, to something more like a screen that one looks at..." 25-6

"It is through the transformation of threads into traces, I argue, that surfaces are brought into being. And conversely, it is through the transformation of traces into threads that surfaces are dissolved." 52

"Whereas the living, in making their way in the world, follow the traces left by their predecessors upon the surface of the earth, the dead have to thread their way through its interstices." 53

"The ground is a kind of surface that is visible from above, but not from below. It does not have another side." 56

line <=> linen
text <=> textere (to weave) <=> textile
61

" 'When we work long at a thing and come to know it up and down, in and out, through and through, it becomes in a quite remarkable way translucent.' " --J. Arthur Thompson, "Introduction to Science", 1911, 61

"An ecology of life, in short must be one of threads and traces, not of nodes and connectors. And its subject of inquiry must consist not of the relations between organisms and their external environments but of the relations along their severally enmeshed ways of life. Ecology, in short, is the study of the life of lines." 103

"I began with the observation that the straight line has become an icon of modernity. It offers reason, certainty, authority, a sense of direction. Too often in the twentieth century, however, reason has been shown to work in profoundly irrational ways, certainties have bred fractious conflict, authority has been revealed as the mask of intolerance and oppression, and directions have been confounded in a maze of dead ends. The line, it seems, has been broken into fragments. If the straight line was an icon of modernity, then the fragmented line seems to be emerging as an equally powerful icon of postmodernity. This is anything but a reversion to the meandering line of wayfaring." 167