The line, a mere one dimensional extension, can be put to near infinite uses. In fact, it seems the model of our thought in general. The zero dimensional point on a plane may be the fundamental assumption of geometry, but it’s in the linking of two such points with a line that thought takes on its particular fundamental character.
Strictly speaking, lines are both indispensable and insurmountable. They haunt thought as much as they enable it. Whether it’s their collapsing back into their originary points in Zeno-like paradoxes, or enabling two disparate points to resonate, to connect, to refer. To have a history, a causality, a connection, a destination, a border, a traversal, or to deny a distinction, to overcome a limit, to escape; all fates carried out through, and in the proximity of, so many lines.
A model of thought of lines is a cartography as much as a geography. The former science perfects itself by answering to the latter with greater resolution; more lines, until it tips over a point and falls into it. The painful realization might be then, that the accumulation of lines is not a linear process. As the map fills in terrae incognitae, it erases whole historiographies and banishes voices into eternal anonymity. In trying to decipher the scribbles that have been put to paper, the question that might be no less urgent is — who was holding the pen, and from where did they make these inscriptions, demarcations, and plans?