I once saw an image of the way that people’s eyes move as they read – not in rows straight across from left to right, but in wandering lines that weave across the page like a drunken river swimming towards some unseen ocean of meaning.

Desire lines look like that – like a reader’s gaze wandering over a page, like rivers stumbling across a map – not like paths. Readers skip over some words, linger on others, and sometimes seem drawn more to blank space than printed letters. Rivers cut through a landscape with their own mysterious logic, turning sometimes for something as small as a pile of stones, and at other times, forcing their way into the wall of a cliff. Paths, we think, must make sense – must lead to somewhere, from somewhere. And they do, just as rivers do, inevitably. We do not need to see their direction, to understand their logic, for it to exist. But if we follow these paths, and, in following, recreate them, then our feet at least may know something of their language, even if that understanding never reaches our minds. I can let my eyes wander over a whole page of text without retaining a word of its meaning, because my wandering eyes give my mind time to think. Space to think. It’s the same with walking – as I wander over meandering paths, my mind is liberated by the motion of my feet.

Here’s a video of a child’s eye movement while reading – can you imagine walking in such a pattern?

It seems to me that this is something like the relationship between the line of a sidewalk (the line of the text) and the desire lines we create.