Mid-morning Wednesday. One of those excellent February partly cloudies in Los Angeles. The schedule said it was time to write this essay, so I put down the novel I’m revising and made tea, then consulted a list I update during the week on things I may write about here. Nothing struck me. I drank some tea. I opened the window and my eye was drawn to my sleeve. Damn this is a good sweater, I thought.
Divine inspiration.
The sweater came out of nowhere, a gift. It’s probably the nicest sweater I’ve ever owned, definitely the most expensive. It’s navy, knit from tightly spun wool. The collar, hem and cuffs all have ribs. The body’s weave is a dense grid, but still airy, permitting heat to escape. Personally I’m always hot, I wear shorts year-round, but this sweater, I can wear it over a T-shirt indoors, outdoors, it somehow adapts.
Calling something well-made beautiful isn’t tough, but I think the appeal is more complex. If I’m also pleased by the presumed care that went into designing it, fabricating it, isn’t that mostly fantasy? I own three other sweaters, all attractive and handy – are this one’s qualities so superior, or do I love it more for being new, and if so, how long does that ever last?
I was reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this week and underlined this:
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.
So, maybe I admire the sweater’s traits because I can’t explain them. Why it feels sturdy but not heavy. How there’s no itch or pill. I imagine Issey Miyake on a canoe trip in November, he might have worn something similar.
Probably I am a weirdo.
A few weeks ago, I wore the sweater to a dinner party. The host, a clothes-horse, was in the weeds in the kitchen, so I offered to help him cook. I took off my sweater, draped it over a chair. Another friend came in to make herself a cocktail. A minute later, she’s wearing my sweater over her dress, posing in a long slant of light.
“That looks good on you,” the host said.
“It’s amazing,” she said. “Can I keep it?”
“It’s not mine, unfortunately.”
“Wait, is this yours?” she said, turning to me. Referring to our host, she added, “I just figured it was his – he always has such nice things.”
Any living thing carries marks as a survivor, while non-living things, when new, don’t have that smudge of death – is that going too far? Wednesday afternoon, work finished, day cooled, I took the sweater for a long walk up the canyon while wearing shorts and a T-shirt. It’s a good sweater to live in, I thought, and should age well. And it gives me a lot to consider. What was the giver thinking? How does it regulate temperature so well? Maybe that’s what I like in things: an active mystery.
Definitely a weirdo.
Update: Readers asked for the sweater to be identified. It is the crewneck guide sweater from Filson. More sweater intel in tomorrow’s supplement! Plus:
New documentaries (or doc-style films) to stream or catch in the theater
Recent good books featuring California
Putting emotions to all the news regarding artificial intelligence, and a funny diary about a harrowing emergency
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, along with a longer piece once a month sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored on a Bookshop list.