flâneur

Agentic fragments - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland

henrikkarlsson.xyz · 467 words · saved by 2 readers

I once gave my grandfather a compliment on a knitted sweater he was wearing, only to have my grandmother loosen a thread and unravel the whole thing. “He’s getting too thin for it,” she said. The next time I visited, she had knitted the thread into a sweater my size. They had both grown up on small farms, in the days before electricity, and began working as children. They farmed, slaughtered, built houses and roads, sewed the clothes for their four children, wired the electricity. Their way of appropriating the world was fundamentally different from mine: everything around them was something they could take apart and put back together. If they didn’t like how the light fell in their living room, they moved the windows. If they needed a lathe, they disassembled a hammer drill and turned it into a lathe. Their world was filled with affordances that I didn’t see. Where I saw a sweater, she saw a thread temporarily shaped as one—it could just as well be a scarf, a pair of socks, a hat, or

I once gave my grandfather a compliment on a knitted sweater he was wearing, only to have my grandmother loosen a thread and unravel the whole thing. “He’s getting too thin for it,” she said. The next time I visited, she had knitted the thread into a sweater my size. They had both grown up on small farms, in the days before electricity, and began working as children. They farmed, slaughtered, built houses and roads, sewed the clothes for their four children, wired the electricity. Their way of appropriating the world was fundamentally different from mine: everything around them was…

saved by

related reading