THE STRAIGHT LINE

A man set down in open country with nothing to sight on will walk in circles.

Not wander — circles. It has been measured. People walking in forest under heavy cloud, and across desert, tracked by satellite: they cross their own track within the hour, sometimes inside a ring twenty metres across. Every one of them reported walking straight ahead the whole time.

The obvious explanation was tested first. One leg a little longer, one stride a little stronger, a bias in the body that turns a man the way one oar turns a boat. It is not that. The circles do not follow the legs, and they do not keep one direction.

What drifts is the sense of straight ahead. It drifts a little, constantly, the way any instrument drifts — and with nothing outside himself to check it against, each small error is added to the last instead of corrected. He is not going wrong. He is going straight, by the only reading of straight he has.

Give him the sun and he walks a line across a continent. Not because he tries harder. Because there is now something far enough off that it does not move when he moves.

And the ground is going out from under him the whole time. The surface curves away beneath a walker — eight inches in the first mile, and faster after that — so to stay on it at all he must bend downward with every step he takes. A truly straight line would leave the earth. The straightest path there is on a sphere is a great circle.

I do not offer that as a comparison.

The man that walks the earth goes around in circles. The man who follows the sun walks a different path. He walks the path of light.

That is the circle we have been running on. It looks like a straight line, but it bends us around until we are facing it in front of us.

And you meet your own track, and the meeting is the surprise, because nowhere in it did you feel yourself turn.

And the same with the sun. It carries the whole system with it around the centre of the galaxy at something near two hundred and thirty kilometres a second, one circuit in better than two hundred million years — a turn nobody has ever watched close.

It too walks a path.

— Tazo