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Building on the renewed interest in surfaces as sites of meaning production, this article compares two kinds of surface: the page and the ground. In medieval Europe, reading was likened to wayfaring through the landscape and the lines inscribed on parchment to paths trodden on the ground. Based on this analogy, the ground resembles a parchment that is reused many times—a palimpsest. But as a surface, the palimpsest is built up by taking layers away. The principle of its formation is anti-stratigraphic. Why, then, do modern people tend to understand both the ground and the page in stratigraphic terms? The answers are found in the technologies of paving and printing. Both separate the space of imagination from our habitation of the earth. Is it possible, then, to reunite the two? This paper concludes with two literary examples of how this might be done. At stake are different ways of thinking about the mind: as palimpsest or substrate. Perhaps by returning to the medieval idea of reading as wayfaring, we can finally restore geography to its literal sense, as the writing of the earth.