Swatches

Eh-hem. Newest swatch at the bottom, my dears.

To knitters, a swatch is a small piece of knitted fabric, used to measure gauge (the size of stitches) and/or to experiment with various pattern elements such as color or texture. Swatches are handy little pieces which represent a much larger work. We thought, hey, why not expand this idea? On this page, we will post written-word swatches, short quotations that are particularly interesting, lovely or provacative, or which succinctly represent the larger work from which they were taken. Enjoy.

Let’s start with Jane Austen, shall we. She certainly is bizarrely popular these days. The following is quoted from Persuasion. Anne Elliot, the protangonist, and Captain Harville, a male aquaintance, are arguing over whether men or women are more constant in their affections. Each argues in favor of their own sex. Captain Harville:

“‘Well, Miss Elliot, as I was saying, we shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman would probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you–all stories, prose and verse…I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs all talk of woman’s fickleness. But, perhaps, you will say, these were all written by men.’

‘Perhpas I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much a higher degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.’

‘But how shall we prove anything?’

‘We never shall. We never can expect to prove anything upon such a point. It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof. We each begin, probably, with a little bias towards our own sex; and upon that bias build every circumstance in favor of it which has occured within our own circle; many of which circumstances (perhaps those very cases which strike us the most) may be precisely such as cannot by brought forward without betraying a confidence, or in some respect, saying what should not be said.'”

Way to be ahead of your time Jane. That goes a long way towards explaining why so many everyday conversations about gender differences make me grumble and wish there was a quiet place I could go knit in for a while until the conversation takes a more fruitful turn.

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Neil Gaiman is the kind of writer whose work is so pefectly delightful that I would read his tax forms if he published them. He does not publish them, as far as I know, but he does publish both novels and graphic novels, all of which, I’m quite sure, should be read and cherished by every literate being. That being the case, it’s awfully hard to choose just a small slice of one of his works, but this excerpt from Stardust, a description of a 17-year-old boy, is too amusing not to share:

“Tristran Thorn, at the age of seventeen and only six months older than Victoria, was half the way between a boy and a man, and equally uncomfortable either role; he seemed to be composed chiefly of elbows and Adam’s apples…He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times…He was a gangling creature of potential, a barrel of dynamite waiting for someone or something to light his fuse; but no one did…”

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If I were single, I might want to allocate a sensible portion of my mating effort towards anyone who could discuss flirting this dispassionately:

“Mating effort is a finite resource that should be allocated judiciously, and preferences for direct gaze in opposite-sex faces would increase the likelihood of allocating mating effort to potential mates who are most likely to reciprocate.” (see the full article from the BBC)

(Although, I might allocate a direct gaze to this researcher, I would direct a steely glare at them as well for their heterosexist attitude.)
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Rouge, one-liners and a tsunami of vodka.

Oh, I do love Garth Ennis. His best-known work, Preacher, is a comic series with the best deus ex machina ever – God is actually a character, a character whose cowardice and manipulation lead Jesse, a chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking modern-day cowboy with heavenly powers, to hunt God down and make him pay for abandoning his creation. Ok, so it sounds irredeemably silly, and you’re already thinking, “Note to self: do not read Preacher. Ever.” But before you banish it to the very bottom of your list of books crazy people recommend to you, you should know Ennis wrote some very interesting, complex and downright cool female characters you would probably want to hang out with. Check out this hilarious comment from one such female character, Amy:

“The hell with it. I shall become a bitter, twisted hag with nothing but rouge and one-liners to disguise the emptiness of my existence, and I shall drown the memory of numerous loveless affairs in a tsunami of vodka.”

Now that’s a gal I could get along with. Seriously folks, Preacher is fantastic, and if you’ve got a high tolerance for violence, foul language and even fouler villains, you should really check it out.

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George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) is a testimony to the hidden lives of everyday good people. In it, Eliot (or as she was know in her daily life: Mary Anne (Marian) Evans) draws a comparison between her do-gooding character Dorothea and St. Theresa of Avila. While Dorothea may have been outwardly judged for marrying beneath her class and was not as much a philanthropic or public figure as St. Theresa, she was still leading a good life and making decisions with little regard for the short-sighted opinions of her peers.

George (Mary Anne (Marian) Evans) Eliot stated that, “Many Theresas have been born who found themselves no epic life; only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with a meaness of opportunity.” These ‘Theresas’ keep everyday life worth living. They offer help to people in their own communities despite lack of money or status. St. Theresa of Avila got a lot of her props for spending her vast inheritance on establishing convents, she used her status to promote herself … what else is an autobiography really? Dorothea just did good within her own means but does that make it any less good?

This line from Middlemarch is a perfect swatch and calls to mind some of the Theresas I have met in my own life:

“Her finely-touched spirit had its fine issues, even though they were not widely visable. Her full nature spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

We owe a lot to people like Dorothea, because after all, isn’t it the way in which individuals choose to live thier life that ultimately drives culture?