Word: threading
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Descartes at 5 a.m. "Learning was to Christina what needles and thread were to other women," wrote a contemporary. When Queen of Sweden, she personally invited scholars from all of Europe to visit her country. For her own edification she commanded the French logical philosopher Descartes to tutor her at 5 a.m. (he contracted flu in the chilly Scandinavian dawns and died). The great composer Alessandro Scarlatti even dedicated an opera...
...campesinos who scratch out a living by growing maize and rice in sun-baked clay that scarcely tolerates thorny scrub and cactus. Inside the Marichal bohio (palm-bark walls, thatched roof, oddments of homemade furniture), a nine-year-old boy sprawls shirtless on the concrete floor, unraveling the thread from an old silk stocking. With infinite care, he winds the thread round and round a scrap of rubber until he has a ball about 9 in. in circumference. The boy's mother enters the room unnoticed and watches, frowning, while he wraps the ball tightly with adhesive tape, tests...
...could never find "the thread that ravels finally/into the interior of a truth." Even in himself he could not find himself. Before Sartre and Heidegger, he described the fallacy of memory, the treason of time, the existential anguish of alienation...
...dress is good for four or five wearings, depending on the clemency of the weather and the intensity of the wearer's frug. Gone are laundry and cleaners' bills; all that's needed is a good eraser. Gone, too, are needle and thread and painstaking alterations. A quick snip of the scissors and the hem is shortened, the neckline lowered, while cut outs sprout all over. As for rips, Scotch Tape is all that's needed for instant repairs...
...there is a single thread that runs through most of these situations, it is simply that human demands are rising exuberantly and straining the available supply of materials and machines to make the goods...