In Which I am Waylaid

This weekend, I took advantage of a few idle hours to clean and organize my needlework supplies. Yardage, skeins, notions, trims, and tools of every shape and purpose occupy three shelves of a closet, the top of one large bookcase, and many odd spots around our studio.

During the course of my work, I discovered a few half-finished projects, including a sweater begun five or six years ago for my husband and put aside when I ran out of yarn to complete the sleeves. I tried at first to purchase more, willing to sacrifice continuity of dye lot, but discovered that the particular ply was no longer being manufactured. It seems to have been some marginal British weight, somewhere between DK and worsted, and the reason I obtained it for such a pittance in the first place was because it was soon going off market. After discarding the idea of purchasing slightly thinner yarn and knitting with one and a half strands, I hid the sweater.

Coming upon an almost finished project of this magnitude, I could not resist the temptation to take it out and see what I might do to salvage all the time and work. Running my fingers over the neat stitches, arrayed like so many little soldiers in row upon row, I remembered the triumph I felt upon learning to knit, pearl, and rib with the yarn looped over my left forefinger during the course of this sweater. I thought about the textured pattern I had carefully chosen from my book to replace the garish cables called for in the design.

It took very little persuasion to convince my husband that he would be just as happy with a sweater vest, thereby eliminating my need for more yarn. I unravelled what had been done of the sleeves, and have been using it knit on the collar and arm binding. I am sewing it up without blocking as I do not have a table large enough to accommodate the pieces. I plan to join the stitches carefully; with any luck, I will do it right and not discover later after it is washed that I have sewn off the grain.

In the meantime, I have sadly neglected my other work. Ah well. Knitting is a skill that ought to be nurtured, according to Miss Amanda Hess, author of The Little Girl's Own Book, 1834:

The favorite employment of our grandmothers ought not to be forgotten. It enables one to be useful in the discipline of life, when they can no longer be actively useful, and it is a never failing amusement. I never knew an old lady ignorant of it, who did not deeply regret she had never learned. Independent of these considerations, a little girl ought to know how to do EVERYTHING; it may not always be a necessity for her to sew and knit -- but she should KNOW HOW.

Perhaps Ogden Nash expressed my husband's sentiments more accurately when he said:

Life will teach you many things, chief of which is that every man who talks to himself isn't necessarily out of his wits;
He may have a wife who knits.
Probably only he and his Maker
Know how many evenings he has spent trying to raise a conservation while his beloved created sweaters by the acre.
Ah, my inquiring offspring, you must learn that life can be very bitter,
But never quite so much so as when trying to pry a word out of a knitter.

A Bridge Sublime

It seems as if in one were cast
The present and the imaged past;
Spanning, as with a bridge sublime,
That fearful lapse of human time;
That gulf, unfathomably spread
Between the living and the dead.

Thomas Love Peacock
Newark Abbey, August, 1842
with a reminiscence of August, 1807

There is a theory of historical reenactment which calls for participants to not only assume the costume, custom, and occasionally characters of people from the past, but to also recreate their world view by studying the literature, science, etc. of the time. In this way they prepare themselves to respond (or at least attempt to do so) to any situation in the manner that the person they are representing might have done.

The limitations of this plan are obvious of course, but it is perhaps one of the most comprehensive invented to date. And it certainly pays due homage to the importance of material records -- be they written, drawn, recorded, etc. -- in communicating beyond our own generation. Washington Irving phrased it far better than I ever could in his word picture "Westminster Abbey" from "The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon," 1819:

Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow men is ever new, active and immediate. He has lived for them more than for himself; he has sacrificed surrounding enjoyments, and shut himself up from the delights of social life, that he might the more intimately commune with distant minds and distant ages. Well may the world cherish his renown; for it has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure. Well may posterity be grateful to his memory; for he has left it an inheritance, not of empty names and sounding actions, but whole treasures of wisdom, bright gems of thought, and golden veins of language.

Reading that, I begin to think I've been wasting my time with all this knitting. (I must admit here that I just purchased enough yarn for three more pairs of stockings.) Perhaps I should drop my needles in favor of a pen...

On the other hand, perhaps my fondness for reading old books comes from the same source as my penchant for old clothes. When I read a novel or a poem written 150 years ago, I feel somehow closer to not only the writer but to all the others who have read and understood it over the years. When I puzzle through the 1852 instructions for a chemise, I feel a kindred spirit with the many women -- now long dead -- who bent their needles at this very project before me.

Today, a friend who has no interest in sewing, and who prefers the Beat Poets to my musty tomes, pointed out that music is yet another sublime bridge to the distant past. Be it symphonic, operatic, or even a country aire cannibalized by Aaron Copeland, music indeed hath charms to send the modern breast back 150 years. I must resolve to remember this hint in the hopes of enticing more people into appreciation of the 1850s.

God bless Stephen Foster.

Those Honest Days of Yore

"They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more homebred, social, and joyous, than at present!"

-- Washington Irving, 1820

One of the great consolations for life in the present is the splendid vantage point it affords for eulogizing the past. Hindsight claims the privilege of selectivity; it casts a silvery glow over the things we choose to remember, and tactfully obscures those points that interfere with nostalgia.

How many of us, when conforming to modernity becomes onerous, have turned a longing eye to this watercolor vision of yesteryear? What would we not give to return to those harmonious days of sincere affection, beautiful dwellings, and verdant nature -- when men and women rose with the sun and retired after a well-ordered day of joyful labor to an ivy-covered cottage?

Delusional? Perhaps. But our race has earned the right to make its own version of the past -- earned it by enduring all the present days that once were. The gift history brings is the ability to speak to future generations, through oral tradition and written record; to transmit that which is best of ourselves and of our times so that it may be saved, and the rest, like a pain that has subsided, blessedly forgotten.

The past, like a fine wine, benefits from aging, that it may mellow and take on the elusive flavor we are seeking. 150 years seems a decent interval for the cellar. And there is no one left living to tell us what we do not wish to hear. Won't you join me in reliving the best of the 1850s? I chose New York City because that is where I am now -- it's enough to transmute time without worrying about place. Besides, I have a feeling New York City was (as some feel it is now) the place to be in 1850...