The myth of linear progress
The story begins with a ruler and a straightedge. The ruler measures. The straightedge promises direction. Someone draws a line from the village to the horizon and says: there. We will go there. The line is all vertebrae, no stomach.
But the village dog, who never attended the ceremony, trots ahead, pausing for smells, puddles, news of other dogs. He arrives before everyone else, soaked and triumphant, having taken a path that cannot be summarized.
Prologue concerning a line
We believe in lines because they let us forget about time. A line extracts a path from its weather. It forbids the gusts, edits the detours, launders the mud from the feet. A line is a future without incidents.
And yet each day arrives with that faintly comic wobble; the teacup that refuses to stack, the bus that shutters and refuses to arrive, a sentence that insists on an extra clause. Even our breath, if you watch it, is more wave than rod.
The drunk and the clock
Imagine a drunk leaving a tavern at midnight with a pocket watch that has promised to keep perfect time. The watch is linear; the street is not. He proceeds: one step toward home, two toward a streetlamp, a graceful pivot that honors a rumor about a shortcut, an apology to a mailbox. He is not lost. He is sampling.
The next morning he has arrived, late but intact, with a sprig of unknown plant in his hat and a story that makes the watch sputter. If you were to draw his route, it would resemble the handwriting of a nervous saint.
Why say this is failure? What it is, is a method.
The cartographer of partial maps
There was once a cartographer hired by a city that kept rearranging itself. Every morning the neighborhoods performed tiny migrations. A bakery drifted two doors down, a staircase widened by a degree, a square acquired a diagonal. Citizens accepted this as one accepts freckles.
The cartographer understood that a single definitive map would be a lie. Instead he drew atlases of contingencies. If you leave at dawn, the alley behind the cinema aligns with the footbridge; if at noon, beware the cranky shade; if it rains, the museum doubles in size. A traveler could combine these partial maps like transparencies and compose a route that acknowledged the day’s temperament.
People complained: “where is the shortest path?” He shrugged. Shortest according to whom, your shoes, or your ambition?
Letters to a student of destinations
Dear student,
You ask whether there is a path that guarantees ascent. I reply: yes, many. Each one works exactly once.
You ask how to avoid error. I reply: choose interesting errors. The dull error repeats; the lively one multiplies your options.
You ask for a schedule of milestones. I send you a bag of marbles. Each morning, draw one, assign it meaning, proceed. After months the meanings become clearer, and the marbles disappear. Perhaps another needed them more.
I do not advise chaos. I advise listening to the room. Rooms speak in drafts, in the hush of forgotten corners, in the whisper of dust motes dancing in sunbeams. The room where you are is a random variable with memory.
City of thresholds
There is a city built entirely of thresholds. Doors without rooms, stairheads without stairs, gates that open onto other gates. The citizens live in the act of passing. They picnic on doormats, they flirt on landings. No one asks “have you arrived?” because arrival would be a category error, like asking a river whether it prefers the left bank.
Travelers find this exasperating at first. Only after sufficient crossings do they realize that certain thresholds revisit them in altered costumes; the same arch, but with an espresso machine humming nearby; the same lintel, but now flanked by a shoemaker with a philosophical objection to shoes. Repetition, yes, but with memory. The city advances by paraphrasing itself.
If you insist on outcomes, you miss the beauty in what comes before.
The broom and the broom closet
A scholar proposed to tidy the world. She began with a broom closet. She inventoried brooms, labeled shelves, banished obsolete handles, recorded bristles per square centimeter in a ledger bound in gray skin. The closet gleamed with taxonomy. She shut the door and, for a minute, knew peace.
Then a neighbor borrowed a broom and returned it shorter, confessing it had been used to knock at a ceiling in celebration of a victory elsewhere. A child hid three marbles behind the ledger. An open window and a stray gust conspired to line the closet with yesterday’s golden foliage. The scholar opened the door and found that entropy, far from being a catastrophe, had delivered narrative.
She kept the ledger; she learned to annotate.
The museum of might-have-beens
In a corner of the city there is a small museum. Its exhibits are minor: a bus you almost caught, an umbrella you didn’t buy, the person you sat beside and did not address. Each display case contains a label: “if you had turned left, this would have been your favorite café.” The rooms are quiet; visitors walk as if trying not to disturb sleeping cats.
Sometimes a new wing appears overnight. The curators claim the collection expands whenever a life is optimized to a single metric. The overflow is immense. The museum is funded by disappointment, but staffed by curiosity.
Exit through the gift shop. You can purchase a blank map and a pencil.
Footnotes from the body
[1] The heart does not beat “better” when you are good. It beats differently in fear, exaltation, boredom; it leaves marginalia. A cardiogram is a poem of deviations.
[2] Muscles learn by wobbling. The straightest posture is the stiffest; the steady line belongs to the statue, which is exemplary in nothing but stillness.
A minor zoology of paths
A geodesic thinks itself superior in its uncompromising efficiency. A spiral answers that it remembers what it has seen. A labyrinth, when asked for directions, hands you a mirror. The corridor keeps going because it has never learned to stop. The meadow invites you to invent a path and forget it at once.
Against the sermon of inevitability
The myth of linear progress flatters us: you will be better tomorrow because that is what time does to deserving people. But time is not a conveyor belt. It is a patient animal that sometimes kneels and sometimes bolts sideways because a fly bit it. We improve, when we do, by negotiating with how the animal moves.
I have met people who ascended like rockets and learned nothing of wind. I have met people who drifted like seeds and colonized an entire hillside.
A small mechanics of grace
Grace is the moment when a random stumble becomes a dance step because you decided to keep going in the direction of the mistake. A violinist who cracks a note on stage can either die publicly or braid the crack into an ornament the audience will think she intended.
To practice this, you must be exacting about the wrong things: notice the texture of error, not just the fact of it. If your project deviates, label the deviation with a color, then decorate around it until the room admits it as a feature. Rigorous improvisation is not an oxymoron. It is what living things do.
Postscript with constellations
Astronomers connect stars with lines, naming bears and hunters, not because the heavens are hunting, but because a line is a way to show we are searching. Behind each constellation there is the actual sky, turbulent, expanding, indifferent to our rulers. And still, the bears guide sailors home.
Draw your lines, then. Just be ready to redraw. Treat the arrow as a draft. Take the detour with the same concentration you planned for the summit. If anyone insists on your “progress,” show them your pockets: a sprig of unknown plant, a marble, a ledger with untranslatable notations, a ticket to a museum that adds rooms while you sleep.
You will not move in a straight line toward a perfect end state. You will wobble, loop, backtrack, leap; you will find thresholds and brooms and partial maps; you will accumulate footnotes. And one day, all at once, your life will look, in retrospect, gracefully composed.
The drunk got home. The dog arrived early. The ruler remains useful, for drawing margins. The straightedge is best at underlining passages you wish to revisit. As for the horizon: let it stay where it is, a polite companion that keeps the sky from falling into our tea.
Walk. Keep the watch if you must, but listen for the room. If you find yourself stumbling, say: good. Now we’re getting somewhere.