But if I hurry I will lose the thread; or the narrative will be like knitting done in a bad temper. The tension goes wrong; you come back later, measure your work, and find that it hasn’t grown as you imagined. Then you must unravel it, row by row, resenting each slick twist and pull that undoes, so easily, what you laboured over; and when you work again you must do it with the used wool, every kink in it reminding you of your failure. Our autobiographies are similar, I think; I mean the unwritten volumes, the stories for an audience of one. This account we give to ourselves of our life – the shape changes moment by moment. We pick up the thread and we use it once, then we use it again, in a more complex form, in a more useful garment, one that conforms more to fashion and our current shape. I wasn’t much of a knitter, early in my life. I was perpetually doing a kettle-holder. What is a kettle-holder? you’ll ask. It is a kind name for any chewed-looking half-ravelled object of rough oblong shape, knotted up by a day-dreaming nine-year-old on the biggest size of wooden needles: made in an unlikely shade like lavender or bottle-green, in wool left over from some adult’s abandoned project: or perhaps from a garment worn and picked apart, so that the secondhand yarn snakes under your fingertips, fighting to get back to the pattern that it’s already learnt.
What do You think about An Experiment In Love: A Novel?
